Cascadable Stochastic Logic for DNA Storage

Ever since Watson and Crick first described the molecular structure of DNA, its information-bearing potential has been apparent to computer scientists. This has led to a concerted effort in academia and industry to deliver practical DNA data storage systems. This paper presents a novel approach for both storage and computation with DNA. Data is stored in the form of analog values of the relative concentration of different DNA molecules. Computation is in the form of cas-cadable NAND operations, effected via toehold-mediated strand displacement reactions operating on these concentration values. Results were verified with the 'Peppercorn Enumerator, ' a recent software tool for analyzing domain-level strand displacement. In all cases, the relative error in output concentration was less than 0.03%. The approach is robust to encoding errors and cross-hybridization. It does not rely on long DNA strands, which are expensive to synthesize. It opens new avenues for storage and computing, including the implementation of a wide range of useful mathematical functions in vitro.