Biochemical approaches for decoding the information stored with metabolites
Molecular data storage is an emerging supplement to conventional information storage methods. In addition to the information storage with DNA or synthetic polymers, a recently proposed strategy that uses small molecule mixtures as information carriers has sparked interest since it is a synthesis-free method. Here, we demonstrate two methods for decoding digital information stored in two sets of small-molecule metabolites. The information is stored as binary code, 0 or 1, based on the absence or presence of each particular metabolite in the mixture. In the first approach, the information was encoded by five metabolites (sarcosine, cholesterol, xanthine, glucose, and galactose) and stored as mixture solutions in a 384-well microplate. The information was read out by cascade enzymatic reactions that can specifically convert the metabolites to a colorimetric product, which was then assayed by a microplate reader. We stored a 60×32-pixel picture (1920 bits) with 384 mixtures of small molecules with a reading accuracy of 96.68 %, and also demonstrated the encoding of a 220-bit text message. Alternatively, another set of six metabolites (bilirubin, uric acid, urea, creatinine, glucose, and triglyceride) was deployed to encode a 78×102-pixel picture (7956 bits) with 1326 mixtures, which was decoded automatically by a biochemistry analyzer with a 98.96 % accuracy. This work showcases that common metabolites can be used as digital molecules for information storage, and the information decoding can be done by accessible instruments in an ordinary biochemical laboratory.
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