DNA storage of digital media using DNA Fountain. DNA Fountain

DNA is an attractive medium to store digital information. Here, we report a storage strategy, called DNA Fountain, that is highly robust and approaches the information capacity per nucleotide. Using our approach, we stored a full computer operating system, movie, and other files with a total of 2.14x10^6 bytes in DNA oligos and perfectly retrieved the information from a sequencing coverage equivalent to a single tile of Illumina sequencing. We also tested a process that allows 2.18×1015 retrievals using the original DNA sample and were able to perfectly decode the data. Finally, we explored the limit of our architecture in terms of bytes per molecule and obtained a perfect retrieval from a density of 215Petabyte/gram of DNA, orders of magnitude higher than previous reports.

DNA是一种极具吸引力的数字信息存储介质。本研究提出了一种名为DNA喷泉（DNA Fountain）的存储策略，该策略具备极高鲁棒性，且趋近于单核苷酸的信息存储容量。借助该方法，我们将总计2.14×10^6字节的完整计算机操作系统、电影及其他文件存储于DNA寡核苷酸链（DNA oligos）中，并在仅相当于单块Illumina（Illumina）测序芯片单一片段的测序覆盖度下完美恢复了全部存储信息。此外，我们利用原始DNA样本测试了可支持2.18×10^15次读取操作的流程，并成功实现了数据的完美解码。最后，我们从单分子存储字节数的维度探究了本架构的存储极限，在达到215拍字节/克DNA的存储密度下仍实现了完美的信息读取，该密度较此前已有研究报道高出数个数量级。