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Catalog is a Massachusetts-based company developing a data conversion and storage platform.It offers what is described as an example of a DNA-based computer that stores lots of data in DNA format, to access and compute data in parallel ways.The company's platform facilitates the encoding of data and information and makes it economically feasible to use DNA as the major medium for long-term data archival.
The company's technology is based on the idea of storing information using DNA. This concept has been around for a while, with the cost of DNA synthesis being a bottleneck in the process and hampering the concept's adoption. Catalog has been building a technology that is similar to a printing press with moveable typefaces, which means instead of having to synthesize billions of different molecules, they are creating a necessary diversity through moving typefaces in different combinations.
The technology is based, in part, on the use of DNA in nature as an information storage medium, and on the concept of the human body, or cells, as computers capable of accessing the naturally stored data in DNA and computing in it massively parallel ways. The company, further, has developed a way of incorporating DNA into algorithms and applications with potential widespread commercial use through its proprietary data-encoding scheme to automation. This is new because of the minimal DNA synthesis Catalog's platform requires to store a large amount of information.
An introduction to DNA-based data storage and Catalog.
The company's custom-developed DNA writer, "Shannon," is capable of hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions per second, according to the company, and is designed to write at a speed of over 10MB/second at full capacity, and stores up to 1.63 TB of compressed data in a single run. Expected applications for this technology include fraud detection in financial services, image processing for defect discovery in manufacturing, and digital signal processing, such as seismic processing.
The development of the computing platform in which data management and computation can occur through manipulation of synthetic DNA was helped, in part, by the company's September 2021 Series B funding round. The company already said it intended to use part of the funding to create an ecosystem of collaborators, partners, and users of DNA-based computing, while maintaining the company's involvement in the DNA Storage Alliance to continue to help grow the industry around DNA storage.
