Novel combinatorial coding results for DNA sequencing and data storage

Abstract

Due to its incredible density and durability, DNA storage is a promising storage medium with the potential to handle the problems associated with the current exponential growth of data. However, DNA is an exotic storage technology, and as such, it can experience types of errors that typically do not occur in traditional storage devices such as, for example, insertions and deletions. We build upon a previous work by Schoeny et al. to construct an efficient non-binary burst-deletion correcting code. By setting the alphabet size to 4, this code is specifically suited for correcting burst-deletions in DNA storage.