Science Daily October 13, 2021
A team of researchers in the US (Harvard University, Northwestern University) has shown 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 (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. They wrote, 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). They demonstrated that the fluorescent data could be read 1,000 times without a significant loss in intensity. Theoretically, the data can be saved for thousands of years or more. The dye method offers an enticing alternative because of its speed and cost…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
