Abstract

DNA emerged as novel material for mass data storage, the serious problem human society is facing. Taking advantage of current synthesis capacity, massive oligo pool demonstrated its high-potential in data storage in test tube. Herein, mixed culture of bacterial cells carrying mass oligo pool that was assembled in a high copy plasmid was presented as a stable material for large scale data storage. Living cells data storage was fabricated by a multiple-steps process, assembly, transformation and mixed culture. The underlying principle was explored by deep bioinformatic analysis. Although homology assembly showed sequence context dependent bias but the massive digital information oligos in mixed culture were constant over multiple successive passaging. In pushing the limitation, over ten thousand distinct oligos, totally 2304 Kbps encoding 445 KB digital data including texts and images, were stored in bacterial cell, the largest archival data storage in living cell reported so far. The mixed culture of living cell data storage opens up a new approach to simply bridge the in vitro and in vivo storage system with combined advantage of both storage capability and economical information propagation.