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.

Quantifying molecular bias in DNA data storage.

DNA has recently emerged as an attractive medium for archival data storage. Recent work has demonstrated proof-of-principle prototype systems; however, very uneven (biased) sequencing coverage has been reported, which indicates inefficiencies in the storage process. Deviations from the average coverage in the sequence copy distribution can either cause wasteful provisioning in sequencing or excessive number of missing sequences.

Author Correction: Probing the physical limits of reliable DNA data retrieval.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Probing the physical limits of reliable DNA data retrieval.

Synthetic DNA is gaining momentum as a potential storage medium for archival data storage. In this process, digital information is translated into sequences of nucleotides and the resulting synthetic DNA strands are then stored for later retrieval. Here, we demonstrate reliable file recovery with PCR-based random access when as few as ten copies per sequence are stored, on average.

DNA assembly for nanopore data storage readout.

Synthetic DNA is becoming an attractive substrate for digital data storage due to its density, durability, and relevance in biological research. A major challenge in making DNA data storage a reality is that reading DNA back into data using sequencing by synthesis remains a laborious, slow and expensive process. Here, we demonstrate successful decoding of 1.

Random access in large-scale DNA data storage.

Synthetic DNA is durable and can encode digital data with high density, making it an attractive medium for data storage. However, recovering stored data on a large-scale currently requires all the DNA in a pool to be sequenced, even if only a subset of the information needs to be extracted. Here, we encode and store 35 distinct files (over 200 MB of data), in more than 13 million DNA oligonucleotides, and show that we can recover each file individually and with no errors, using a random access approach.