ABSTRACT
It goes without saying that DNA is an attractive storage medium for digital information, both in nature and in the laboratory. DNA-based information can be recorded, reposited, replicated, and read-out with little or no error. Sequencing or chemical synthesis technologies for reading and writing DNA sequences are currently in a phase where the rate of improvement far outpaces the canonical Moore’s law, which predicts that the capacity for electronic information storage doubles roughly every 2 years.1 This means that the cost for, and effort of, DNA sequencing is decreasing very rapidly and reagent costs for synthesis of large sets of probe molecules are trivial. Other DNA-based methods, such as real-time PCR, provide high precision and vast dynamic ranges for quantitative measurements of specic nucleic acid molecules at the levels of DNA or RNA.
