New Approach To Large Data Storage: Libraries Of Plastic Molecule

Libraries of Plastic Molecules Could Store Huge Amounts of Data

Conor Gearin | August 5, 2016

One day your hard drive could just be a pile of plastic. Researchers have coded a word into short chains of plastic molecules, which could be used as a space-saving way to store our mountains of data – or even to reveal counterfeit goods.
DNA has shown some promise in holding millions of bits of information in a tiny volume. But DNA is fragile and hard to write and read. So Jean-François Lutz at the Institut Charles Sadron in Strasbourg, France, has been experimenting with more customisable chains of plastic molecules that can encode information in similar ways.
Also known as polymers, these chains are made up of two kinds of molecules that stand for the 1s and 0s of digital computer code. Previous research has seen data stored in single long chains, but these become harder to read as the length increases, so the storage record stands at just 10 bits.

"Molecular data storage? ...One day your hard drive could just be a pile of plastic. Researchers have coded a word into short chains of plastic molecules, which could be used as a space-saving way to store our mountains of data – or even to reveal counterfeit goods." Source:  http://www.geekjournal.net/articles/2016/08/libraries-of-plastic-molecules-could-store-huge-amounts-of-data-89967.html

"Species suitable for molecular data storage must (i) possess two or more physico-chemically distinct states that can be conveniently switched by application of external triggers and (ii) should be addressable and switchable within the nanometer regime. Towards these goals, our research group is studying electronic properties of molecules by the use of break junction and STM techniques." Source: http://www.ruben-group.de/molecelec.html

<more at https://www.newscientist.com/article/2100152-libraries-of-plastic-molecules-could-store-huge-amounts-of-data/; related articles and links: http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/11/researchers-craft-molecule-that-works-as-flash-storage/ (Researchers craft molecule that works as flash storage. A cage containing a chemical that holds electrons. November 20, 2014) and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201605279/full (Coding in 2D: Using Intentional Dispersity to Enhance the Information Capacity of Sequence-Coded Polymer Barcodes. Chloé Laure, Denise Karamessini, Olgica Milenkovic, Laurence Charles, and Jean-François Lutz. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.. doi:10.1002/anie.201605279. [Abstract: A 2D approach was studied for the design of polymer-based molecular barcodes. Uniform oligo(alkoxyamine amide)s, containing a monomer-coded binary message, were synthesized by orthogonal solid-phase chemistry. Sets of oligomers with different chain-lengths were prepared. The physical mixture of these uniform oligomers leads to an intentional dispersity (1st dimension fingerprint), which is measured by electrospray mass spectrometry. Furthermore, the monomer sequence of each component of the mass distribution can be analyzed by tandem mass spectrometry (2nd dimension sequencing). By summing the sequence information of all components, a binary message can be read. A 4-bytes extended ASCII-coded message was written on a set of six uniform oligomers. Alternatively, a 3-bytes sequence was written on a set of five oligomers. In both cases, the coded binary information was recovered.])>