Abstract
The rapidly increasing use of digital technologies requires the rethinking of methods to store data. This work shows that digital data can be stored in mixtures of fluorescent dye molecules, which are deposited on a surface by inkjet printing, where an amide bond tethers the dye molecules to the surface. A microscope equipped with a multichannel fluorescence detector distinguishes individual dyes in the mixture. The presence or absence of these molecules in the mixture encodes binary information (i.e., “0” or “1”). The use of mixtures of molecules, instead of sequence-defined macromolecules, minimizes the time and difficulty of synthesis and eliminates the requirement of sequencing. We have written, stored, and read a total of approximately 400 kilobits (both text and images) with greater than 99% recovery of information, written at an average rate of 128 bits/s (16 bytes/s) and read at a rate of 469 bits/s (58.6 bytes/s).
Highlights
The detection technique, a multichannel fluorescence detector, uses a linear array of detection channels to resolve multiple emission bands in parallel and enables spatially resolved information on the presence or absence of the dye molecules to be obtained in a single scan across the substrate
The “writing” process uses inkjet printing wherein molecules that are deposited onto the surface form an amide bond to link the dye molecules to the substrate
We show that multiple (>1000) readouts of such optical molecular information are possible without significant loss of information through bleaching and other mechanisms
Summary
In order to preserve information over long periods of time, reduce the energy consumption for storage, and prevent tampering with stored information, new materials and strategies for storage of information would be useful and may be required.[1−5] Current devices used to store information (optical media, magnetic media, and flash memory) have insufficient operational lifetimes for long-term storage typically less than two decades and require substantial energy to maintain the stored information.[6]Molecules (including, but not limited to DNA) can be used to store information without power, at high areal density, and are claimed to be stable for thousands of years or more.[7−14]For these systems to be applied to store information, several problems must be considered including (i) read/write speeds, (ii) retention of information, (iii) density of information, and (iv) cost.[15]Here, we demonstrate a write-once-read-many (WORM)molecular information storage approach using mixtures of fluorescent dye molecules covalently bound to an epoxy substrate. An inkjet printer enables writing of information at a rate of 16 bytes/s, and a multichannel fluorescence detector in a confocal microscope enables reading at a rate of 58 kilobytes/s Using this approach, we have written 14 075 bytes of digital information on a 7.2 mm × 7.2 mm surface (resulting in an aerial information density of 271.5 bytes/mm2) and read this information over 1000 times without significant loss (less than 20%) in fluorescent signal intensity. We have written 14 075 bytes of digital information on a 7.2 mm × 7.2 mm surface (resulting in an aerial information density of 271.5 bytes/mm2) and read this information over 1000 times without significant loss (less than 20%) in fluorescent signal intensity This approach enables information storage with high density, fast read/write speeds, and multiple reads of a single set of molecules without loss of information, all at an acceptable cost
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