An Empirical Comparison of Preservation Methods for Synthetic DNA Data Storage
Abstract
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. In this paper, nine different methods used to preserve data files encoded in synthetic DNA are evaluated by accelerated aging of nearly 29 000 DNA sequences. In addition to a molecular count comparison, the DNA is also sequenced and analyzed after aging. These findings show that errors and erasures are stochastic and show no practical distribution difference between preservation methods. Finally, the physical density of these methods is compared and a stability versus density trade‐offs discussion provided.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jan 25, 2021
- Source ID
- 10.1002/smtd.202001094
Entities
People
- A. Xavier Kohll
- Bichlien H. Nguyen
- Karin Strauss
- Lee Organick
- Luis Ceze
- Rachel Mcamis
- Robert N. Grass
- Siena Dumas Ang
- Weida D. Chen
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- ETH Zurich
- Microsoft
- University of Washington