An Empirical Comparison of Preservation Methods for Synthetic DNA Data Storage.

Synthetic DNA has recently risen as a viable alternative for long-term digital data storage. To ensure that information is safely recovered after storage, it is essential to appropriately preserve the physical DNA molecules encoding the data. While preservation of biological DNA has been studied previously, synthetic DNA differs in that it is typically much shorter in length, it has different sequence profiles with fewer, if any, repeats (or homopolymers), and it has different contaminants.

Increased Longevity and Pumping Performance of an Injection Molded Soft Total Artificial Heart.

In this work, we present an injection molded soft total artificial heart (sTAH) produced from high-temperature vulcanizing silicone using an industrial metal injection mold. At 60 beats per minute, the sTAH exhibited a total cardiac output of over 16 L/min against physiological pressures on a mock circulation and was pumped continuously for 110,000 actuation cycles. Finite element analysis was used to identify stress concentrations within the sTAH, allowing an optimized design to be proposed.

Stabilizing synthetic DNA for long-term data storage with earth alkaline salts.

Rapid aging tests (70 °C, 50% RH) of solid state DNA dried in the presence of various salt formulations, showed the strong stabilizing effect of calcium phosphate, calcium chloride and magnesium chloride, even at high DNA loadings (>20 wt%). A DNA-based digital information storage system utilizing the stabilizing effect of MgCl was tested by storing a DNA file, encoding 115 kB of digital data, and the successful readout of the file by sequencing after accelerated aging.

Reading and writing digital data in DNA.

Because of its longevity and enormous information density, DNA is considered a promising data storage medium. In this work, we provide instructions for archiving digital information in the form of DNA and for subsequently retrieving it from the DNA. In principle, information can be represented in DNA by simply mapping the digital information to DNA and synthesizing it.

DNA Barcode Quantification As a Robust Tool for Measuring Mixing Ratios in Two-Component Systems.

For many manufacturing processes, correct mixing compositions are crucial to guarantee product quality. However, the analysis of mixing ratios based on component balances can be challenging and requires extensive infrastructure. DNA barcodes have been previously proposed as low-cost markers for product authenticity, and we show here that the quantification of such barcodes via a quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) enables the determination of mixing ratios in a range of liquid and polymeric products.