Abstract
Humanity produces data at exponential rates, creating a growing demand for better storage devices. DNA molecules are an attractive medium to store digital information due to their durability and high information density. Recent studies have made large strides in developing DNA storage schemes by exploiting the advent of massive parallel synthesis of DNA oligos and the high throughput of sequencing platforms. However, most of these experiments reported small gaps and errors in the retrieved information. Here, we report a strategy to store and retrieve DNA information that is robust and approaches the theoretical maximum of information that can be stored per nucleotide. The success of our strategy lies in careful adaption of recent developments in coding theory to the domain specific constrains of DNA storage. To test our strategy, we stored an entire computer operating system, a movie, a gift card, and other computer files with a total of 2.14*10^6 bytes in DNA oligos. We were able to fully retrieve the information without a single error even with a sequencing throughput on the scale of a single tile of an Illumina sequencing flow cell. To further stress our strategy, we created a deep copy of the data by PCR amplifying the oligo pool in a total of nine successive reactions, reflecting one complete path of an exponential process to copy the file 218*10^12 times. We perfectly retrieved the original data with only five million reads. Taken together, our approach opens the possibility of highly reliable DNA-based storage that approaches the information capacity of DNA molecules and enables virtually unlimited data retrieval.
