Achieving the Capacity of a DNA Storage Channel with Linear Coding Schemes

Abstract

Due to the redundant nature of DNA synthesis and sequencing technologies, a basic model for a DNA storage system is a multi-draw “shuffling-sampling” channel. In this model, a random number of noisy copies of each sequence is observed at the channel output. Recent works have characterized the capacity of such a DNA storage channel under different noise and sequencing models, relying on sophisticated typicality-based approaches for the achievability. Here, we consider a multi-draw DNA storage channel in the setting of noise corruption by a binary erasure channel. We show that, in this setting, the capacity is achieved by linear coding schemes. This leads to a considerably simpler derivation of the capacity expression of a multi-draw DNA storage channel than existing results in the literature.