ADS Codex primary investigator Latchesar Ionkov demonstrates the codec algorithms.

Currently, warehouses the size of several football fields are used to store data on hard drives, and in the U.S. alone storage centers account for nearly two percent of the country’s electricity consumption. Soon, the world will generate more digital data than it can store. Los Alamos researchers have turned to DNA to store more data in less space while consuming less energy than conventional media. Los Alamos National Laboratory’s ADS Codex software provides functionality for both converting a binary data file into a sequence of DNA (encoding) and for converting sequences of DNA into binary data (decoding). Molecular storage, and specifically synthetic DNA, is a rapidly evolving technology that provides high levels of physical data density and longevity for archival storage systems. The ADS Codex is an end-to-end codec demonstrated to achieve high bit density (0.99 bits of data per nucleotide) while successfully recovering data across a variety of industrial DNA processes for writing and reading data. The ADS Codex is fully accessible to all users through open-source software available on GitHub.