2019/03/07 by Melpomeni Dimopoulou, Marc Antonini, Dimopoulou, Melpomeni +5 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #DNA and Biological Computing #Cellular Automata and Applications #Advanced biosensing and bioanalysis techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.03024
Living in the age of the digital media explosion, the amount of data that is\nbeing stored increases dramatically. However, even if existing storage systems\nsuggest efficiency in capacity, they are lacking in durability. Hard disks,\nflash, tape or even optical storage have limited lifespan in the range of 5 to\n20 years. Interestingly, recent studies have proven that it was possible to use\nsynthetic DNA for the storage of digital data, introducing a strong candidate\nto achieve data longevity. The DNA's biological properties allows the storage\nof a great amount of information into an extraordinary small volume while also\npromising efficient storage for centuries or even longer with no loss of\ninformation. However, encoding digital data onto DNA is not obvious, because\nwhen decoding, we have to face the problem of sequencing noise robustness.\nFurthermore, synthesizing DNA is an expensive process and thus, controlling the\ncompression ratio by optimizing the rate-distortion trade-off is an important\nchallenge we have to deal with. This work proposes a coding solution for the\nstorage of digital images onto synthetic DNA. We developed a new encoding\nalgorithm which generates a DNA code robust to biological errors coming from\nthe synthesis and the sequencing processes. Furthermore, thanks to an optimized\nallocation process the solution is able to control the compression ratio and\nthus the length of the synthesized DNA strand. Results show an improvement in\nterms of coding potential compared to previous state-of-the-art works.\n