Low cost DNA data storage using photolithographic synthesis and advanced information reconstruction and error correction


Date

2020

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Altmetric

Data

Abstract

Due to its longevity and enormous information density, DNA is an attractive medium for archival storage. The current hamstring of DNA data storage systems—both in cost and speed—is synthesis. The key idea for breaking this bottleneck pursued in this work is to move beyond the low-error and expensive synthesis employed almost exclusively in today’s systems, towards cheaper, potentially faster, but high-error synthesis technologies. Here, we demonstrate a DNA storage system that relies on massively parallel light-directed synthesis, which is considerably cheaper than conventional solid-phase synthesis. However, this technology has a high sequence error rate when optimized for speed. We demonstrate that even in this high-error regime, reliable storage of information is possible, by developing a pipeline of algorithms for encoding and reconstruction of the information. In our experiments, we store a file containing sheet music of Mozart, and show perfect data recovery from low synthesis fidelity DNA.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Volume

11 (1)

Pages / Article No.

5345

Publisher

Nature

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Organisational unit

08826 - Grass, Robert (Tit.-Prof.) check_circle
03673 - Stark, Wendelin J. / Stark, Wendelin J. check_circle

Notes

Funding

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