CMOSS: A Reliable, Motif-based Columnar Molecular Storage System

Overview & Synopsis

The surge in demand for cost-effective long-term archival media, coupled with density limitations of contemporary magnetic media, has resulted in synthetic DNA emerging as a promising new alternative. Despite its benefits, storing data in DNA poses several challenges as the technology used for reading/writing data on DNA are highly error prone. Thus, it is important to design pipelines that can efficiently use redundancy to mask errors without amplifying read/write cost. In this work, we present Columnar MOlecular Storage System (CMOSS), a novel, end-to-end DNA storage pipeline that can provide error-tolerant data storage at low read/write costs. CMOSS differs from state-of-the-art (SOTA) on three fronts (i) a motif-based, vertical layout in contrast to nucleotidebased horizontal layout, (ii) integrated consensus calling and decoding enabled by the vertical layout, and (iii) a flexible, block-based data organization for random access over DNA storage in contrast to object-based organization. Using an in-depth evaluation with several simulated and real wet lab experiments, we demonstrate the benefits of CMOSS design.