Extended nucleic acid memory as the future of data storage technology

Abstract

The amount of operational data being generated at an exponential rate in various spheres of computing, in turn, has culminated in a pressure on the available silicon memory-constrained by its limited capacity. In recent times, research has been undertaken on DNA computing for memory technology where nucleic acid memory (NAM) was formulated and found to be an efficient alternative for storing a large amount of digital data in the molecular space. This work presents a new encoding scheme which efficiently maps the binary data into a hybrid system of standard as well as non-standard genetic nucleotides to achieve a higher data capacity. Comparative studies have been done with existing encoding schemes, moreover, this work demonstrates the use of unnatural base pairs like Ds-Px and Im-Na which exhibit high stability and high selectivity in a DNA molecule.