Dataset Information

Portable and Error-Free DNA-Based Data Storage.

ABSTRACT: DNA-based data storage is an emerging nonvolatile memory technology of potentially unprecedented density, durability, and replication efficiency. The basic system implementation steps include synthesizing DNA strings that contain user information and subsequently retrieving them via high-throughput sequencing technologies. Existing architectures enable reading and writing but do not offer random-access and error-free data recovery from low-cost, portable devices, which is crucial for making the storage technology competitive with classical recorders. Here we show for the first time that a portable, random-access platform may be implemented in practice using nanopore sequencers. The novelty of our approach is to design an integrated processing pipeline that encodes data to avoid costly synthesis and sequencing errors, enables random access through addressing, and leverages efficient portable sequencing via new iterative alignment and deletion error-correcting codes. Our work represents the only known random access DNA-based data storage system that uses error-prone nanopore sequencers, while still producing error-free readouts with the highest reported information rate/density. As such, it represents a crucial step towards practical employment of DNA molecules as storage media.

SUBMITTER: Yazdi SMHT

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5503945 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Similar Datasets

Project description:Data storage in DNA has recently emerged as a promising archival solution, offering space-efficient and long-lasting digital storage solutions. Recent studies suggest leveraging the inherent redundancy of synthesis and sequencing technologies by using composite DNA alphabets. A major challenge of this approach involves the noisy inference process, obstructing large composite alphabets. This paper introduces a novel approach for DNA-based data storage, offering, in some implementations, a 6.5-fold increase in logical density over standard DNA-based storage systems, with near-zero reconstruction error. Combinatorial DNA encoding uses a set of clearly distinguishable DNA shortmers to construct large combinatorial alphabets, where each letter consists of a subset of shortmers. We formally define various combinatorial encoding schemes and investigate their theoretical properties. These include information density and reconstruction probabilities, as well as required synthesis and sequencing multiplicities. We then propose an end-to-end design for a combinatorial DNA-based data storage system, including encoding schemes, two-dimensional (2D) error correction codes, and reconstruction algorithms, under different error regimes. We performed simulations and show, for example, that the use of 2D Reed-Solomon error correction has significantly improved reconstruction rates. We validated our approach by constructing two combinatorial sequences using Gibson assembly, imitating a 4-cycle combinatorial synthesis process. We confirmed the successful reconstruction, and established the robustness of our approach for different error types. Subsampling experiments supported the important role of sampling rate and its effect on the overall performance. Our work demonstrates the potential of combinatorial shortmer encoding for DNA-based data storage and describes some theoretical research questions and technical challenges. Combining combinatorial principles with error-correcting strategies, and investing in the development of DNA synthesis technologies that efficiently support combinatorial synthesis, can pave the way to efficient, error-resilient DNA-based storage solutions.

Dataset Information

Portable and Error-Free DNA-Based Data Storage.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets