Photon-directed multiplexed enzymatic DNA synthesis for molecular digital data storage

Howon Lee, Daniel J. Wiegand, Kettner Griswold, Sukanya Punthambaker, Honggu Chun, Richie E. Kohman () and George M. Church ()
Additional contact information
Howon Lee: Harvard Medical School
Daniel J. Wiegand: Harvard Medical School
Kettner Griswold: Harvard Medical School
Sukanya Punthambaker: Harvard Medical School
Honggu Chun: Korea University
Richie E. Kohman: Harvard Medical School
George M. Church: Harvard Medical School

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract New storage technologies are needed to keep up with the global demands of data generation. DNA is an ideal storage medium due to its stability, information density and ease-of-readout with advanced sequencing techniques. However, progress in writing DNA is stifled by the continued reliance on chemical synthesis methods. The enzymatic synthesis of DNA is a promising alternative, but thus far has not been well demonstrated in a parallelized manner. Here, we report a multiplexed enzymatic DNA synthesis method using maskless photolithography. Rapid uncaging of Co2+ ions by patterned UV light activates Terminal deoxynucleotidyl Transferase (TdT) for spatially-selective synthesis on an array surface. Spontaneous quenching of reactions by the diffusion of excess caging molecules confines synthesis to light patterns and controls the extension length. We show that our multiplexed synthesis method can be used to store digital data by encoding 12 unique DNA oligonucleotide sequences with video game music, which is equivalent to 84 trits or 110 bits of data.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18681-5 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-18681-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18681-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().