The Marburg research association “MOSLA” tested how data can be translated into molecular structures

Professor Dr. Dominik Heider, a computer scientist from Marburg, is conducting research with the team of the “MOSLA” project on the storage of digital information in DNA.

Marius Welzel, Peter Michael Schwarz, Hannah F. Löchel, Tolganay Kabdullayeva, Sandra Clemens, Anke Becker, Bernd Freisleben and Dominik Heiser just published their paper on “DNA-Aeon provides flexible arithmetic coding for constraint adherence and error correction in DNA storage”. It was accepted by Nature communications 2023, 14:628.

A news article from Philipps University Marburg explains “If you want to store digital information in the form of DNA, the DNA-Aeon coding scheme is recommended to convert the original data into DNA code. DNA-Aeon is characterized in particular by superior error correction.”

Abstract:

The extensive information capacity of DNA, coupled with decreasing costs for DNA synthesis and sequencing, makes DNA an attractive alternative to traditional data storage. The processes of writing, storing, and reading DNA exhibit specific error profiles and constraints DNA sequences have to adhere to. We present DNA-Aeon, a concatenated coding scheme for DNA data storage. It supports the generation of variable-sized encoded sequences with a user-defined Guanine-Cytosine (GC) content, homopolymer length limitation, and the avoidance of undesired motifs. It further enables users to provide custom codebooks adhering to further constraints. DNA-Aeon can correct substitution errors, insertions, deletions, and the loss of whole DNA strands. Comparisons with other codes show better error-correction capabilities of DNA-Aeon at similar redundancy levels with decreased DNA synthesis costs. In-vitro tests indicate high reliability of DNA-Aeon even in the case of skewed sequencing read distributions and high read-dropout.