Dna-storalator: a computational simulator for DNA data storage.

Abstract

Background: DNA data storage is an emerging technology that caught the attention of many researchers and engineers. This technology uses DNA molecules as a storage medium and thus presents an extremely dense and durable storage device. However, the unique nature of the errors in DNA, which include insertion, deletion, and substitution errors, requires the development of new algorithmic and coding solutions for these storage systems.

Results: The DNA-Storalator is a cross-platform software tool that simulates in a simplified digital point of view biological and computational processes involved in the process of storing data in DNA molecules. The simulator receives an input file with the designed DNA strands that store digital data and emulates the different biological and algorithmical components of DNA-based storage system. The biological component includes simulation of the synthesis, PCR, and sequencing stages which are expensive and complicated and therefore are not widely accessible to the community. These processes amplify the data and generate noisy copies of each DNA strand, where the errors are insertions, deletions, long-deletions, and substitutions. The DNA-Storalator injects errors to the data based on the error rates, as they vary between different synthesis and sequencing technologies. The rates are based on comprehensive analysis of data from previous experiments but can also be customized. Additionally, the tool can analyze new datasets and characterize their error rates to build new error models for future usage in the simulator. The DNA-Storalator also enables control of the amplification process and the distribution of the number of copies per designed strand. The coding and algorithmic components are: 1. Clustering algorithms which partition all output noisy strands into groups according to the designed strand they originated from; 2. State-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms that are invoked on each cluster to output a close/exact estimation of the designed strand; 3. Integration with external error-correcting codes and other encoding and decoding techniques.

Conclusions: The suggested computational DNA storage simulator grants researchers from all fields an accessible complete simulator to examine new biological technologies, coding techniques, and algorithms for current and future DNA storage systems.