R&D: Integrated Microfluidic DNA Storage Platform with Automated Sample Handling and Physical Data Partitioning

Analytical Chemistry has published an article written by Yuan Luo, Shuchen Wang, Zhuowei Feng, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Smart Healthcare Engineering, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Advanced Biomaterials, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, No 1088, Xueyuan Rd., Xili, Nanshan District, Shenzhen 518055, Guangdong, P. R. China, and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Advanced Biomaterials, No 1088, Xueyuan Rd., Xili, Nanshan District, Shenzhen 518055, Guangdong, P. R. China, Jie Li, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, No 1088, Xueyuan Rd., Xili, Nanshan District, Shenzhen 518055, Guangdong, P. R. China, Cuiping Mao, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Smart Healthcare Engineering, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Advanced Biomaterials, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, No 1088, Xueyuan Rd., Xili, Nanshan District, Shenzhen 518055, Guangdong, P. R. China, and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Advanced Biomaterials, No 1088, Xueyuan Rd., Xili, Nanshan District, Shenzhen 518055, Guangdong, P. R. China, Rui Wang, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, No 1088, Xueyuan Rd., Xili, Nanshan District, Shenzhen 518055, Guangdong, P. R. China, and Xingyu Jiang, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Smart Healthcare Engineering, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Advanced Biomaterials, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, No 1088, Xueyuan Rd., Xili, Nanshan District, Shenzhen 518055, Guangdong, P. R. China, and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Advanced Biomaterials, No 1088, Xueyuan Rd., Xili, Nanshan District, Shenzhen 518055, Guangdong, P. R. China.

Abstract: “Biopolymers are considered a promising alternative for information storage, and the most successful implementation has been using chemically synthesized DNA to represent binary data, which has achieved tremendous progress at multiple fronts bridging biotechnology with digital information. Currently, a majority of these systems are lacking the system integration and process automation expected by users of digital data and overly use tubes/vials for DNA storage. Herein, we present a microfluidic platform for automated storage and retrieval of data-encoding oligonucleotide samples enabled by a microvalve network architecture. Our platform, equipped with individually addressable compartments, offers an orthogonal strategy of data partitioning and file indexing with respect to the molecular-based random access implementation, with each partition amounting to an equivalence of 9.5 TB data within a 4 × 2 mm2 area. We examined the functionality of the presented platform and its compatibility with the DNA storage workflow coupled with nanopore sequencing to fully recover the stored files, demonstrating a significantly enhanced degree of function integration and process automation compared to that of the existing microfluidic approach.“