Storage of Information Using Small Organic Molecules

Abstract

Although information is ubiquitous, and its technology arguably among the highest that humankind has produced, its very ubiquity has posed new types of problems. Three that involve storage of information (rather than computation) include its usage of energy, the robustness of stored information over long times, and its ability to resist corruption through tampering. The difficulty in solving these problems using present methods has stimulated interest in the possibilities available through fundamentally different strategies, including storage of information in molecules. Here we show that storage of information in mixtures of readily available, stable, low-molecular-weight molecules offers new approaches to this problem. This procedure uses a common, small set of molecules (here, 32 oligopeptides) to write binary information. It minimizes the time and difficulty of synthesis of new molecules. It also circumvents the challenges of encoding and reading messages in linear macromolecules. We have encoded, written, stored, and read a total of approximately 400 kilobits (both text and images), coded as mixtures of molecules, with greater than 99% recovery of information, written at an average rate of 8 bits/s, and read at a rate of 20 bits/s. This demonstration indicates that organic and analytical chemistry offer many new strategies and capabilities to problems in long-term, zero-energy, robust information storage.

Mixed Molecular Electronics: Tunneling Behaviors and Applications of Mixed Self‐Assembled Monolayers

“…Likewise, we believe that the performance of other SAM-based devices can be optimized through molecular dilution without losing the structural order. Recently, Cafferty et al [35] encoded, wrote, stored, and read approximately 400 kb with mixtures of 32 sets of oligopeptides having distinguishable molecular weights in mixed SAMs. Wang et al [34] recently demonstrated that this counter-intuitive approach can be realized in mixed SAMs of Fc-terminated n-undecanethiolate (FcC 11 S; organometallic diode) and n-undecanethiolate (C 11 S) without Fc.…”

High-density information storage in an absolutely defined aperiodic sequence of monodisperse copolyester

“…The solid-phase synthesis has been a method to synthesize polymers with defined aperiodic sequences [9][10][11][12] . Although sequence-defined polymers with more than 100 repeating units have been synthesized 13,14 , synthesis has largely been limited to sequence-defined oligomers with a limited number of repeating units due to the difficulties associated with the repeated step-bystep addition of individual monomers to achieve high molecular weights [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] . The iterative convergent method has been widely adopted for the synthesis of dendritic and linear macromolecules with precisely defined chemical structures [27][28][29][30] .…”

Towards Practical and Robust DNA-Based Data Archiving Using ‘Yin-Yang Codec’ System

“…Currently, some other molecule storage medium was proposed including oligopeptides 3,13 and metabolomes 4 . It is innovative for these techniques to use amino acids and metabolomes for binary transcoding.…”

“…Erlich et. al reported that in their working scheme, the minimum average copy number for data retrieval was around 1.3×10 3 . In this work, we demonstrated that the minimum average copy number for data retrieval is 7×10 3 (Supplementary information), which is consistent with the previous report.…”