Advances in DNA storage

With decreasing costs for DNA synthesis and sequencing, ultra-dense DNA storage is an emerging, viable technology. The original proof of concept [1]–[3] has yielded several experiments of larger scale demonstrating archival storage in DNA molecules [4]–[7]. In particular, a recent collaboration by Harvard and Technicolor announced the storage of 22 MB of data in synthetic DNA [4]. Primarily, existing storage systems utilize high-fidelity synthesizers. For synthesizers which incur non-negligible insertions and deletions, a large fraction of the oligonucleotide segments produced have unequal, variable lengths. This talk overviews methods to correct for synchronization errors in variable-length segments using synchronization codes (e.g., [8], [9]).