Coding for Composite DNA to Correct Substitutions, Strand Losses, and Deletions

TL;DR

This paper develops coding strategies for composite DNA data storage that effectively correct substitutions, strand losses, and deletions, providing theoretical bounds and explicit constructions to enhance data integrity.

Contribution

It introduces novel coding techniques tailored for composite DNA storage, including bounds and explicit constructions for correcting multiple error types.

Findings

Derived non-asymptotic upper bounds on code sizes for multiple error types

Presented explicit code constructions achieving these bounds

Enhanced reliability of DNA data storage systems

Abstract

Composite DNA is a recent method to increase the base alphabet size in DNA-based data storage.This paper models synthesizing and sequencing of composite DNA and introduces coding techniques to correct substitutions, losses of entire strands, and symbol deletion errors. Non-asymptotic upper bounds on the size of codes with $t$ occurrences of these error types are derived. Explicit constructions are presented which can achieve the bounds.