Coding for Composite DNA to Correct Substitutions, Strand Losses, and Deletions

Abstract

Composite DNA is a recent method to increase the base alphabet size in DNA-based data storage. This paper models synthesizing and sequencing of composite DNA and introduces coding techniques to correct substitutions, losses of entire strands, and symbol deletion errors. Non-asymptotic upper bounds on the size of codes with <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$t$</tex> occurrences of these error types are derived. Explicit constructions are presented which can achieve the bounds.