Encoding information in synthetic metabolomes

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217364
• Publication Date: 2019-07-03T13:26:49Z
• Authors: Eamonn Kennedy; Christopher E. Ar...; Joseph Geiser; Peter M. Weber; Christopher Rose; Brenda M. Rubenstein; Jacob K. Rosenstein
• Keywords: Metabolome

Biomolecular information systems offer exciting potential advantages and opportunities to complement conventional semiconductor technologies. Much attention has been paid information-encoding polymers, but small molecules also play important roles in biochemical systems. Downstream from DNA, the metabolome is an information-rich molecular system with diverse chemical dimensions which could be harnessed for storage processing. As a proof of principle small-molecule postgenomic data storage, here we demonstrate workflow representing abstract synthetic mixtures metabolites. Our approach leverages robotic liquid handling writing digital into mixtures, mass spectrometry extracting data. We present several kilobyte-scale image datasets stored metabolomes, can decoded accuracy exceeding 99% using multi-mass logistic regression. Cumulatively, >100,000 bits was written metabolomes. These early demonstrations provide insight some benefits limitations