Back

Guess till correct: Gungnir codec enabling high error-tolerance and low-redundancy DNA storage through substantial computing power

Zhang, J.; Chen, L.; Sun, J.; Li, S.; Zhou, Y.; Wu, Z.; Li, C.; Zheng, Z.; Luo, R.

2025-09-04 bioinformatics
10.1101/2025.08.29.673174 bioRxiv
Show abstract

DNA has emerged as a compelling archival storage medium, offering unprecedented information density and millennia-scale durability. Despite its promise, DNA-based data storage faces critical challenges due to error-prone processes during DNA synthesis, storage, and sequencing. In this study, we introduce Gungnir, a codec system using the proof-of-work idea to address substitution, insertion, and deletion errors in a sequence. With a hash signature for each data fragment, Gungnir corrects the errors by testing the educated guesses until the hash signature is matched. For practicality, especially when sequenced with nanopore long-read, Gungnir also considers biochemical constraints including GC-content, homopolymers, and error-prone motifs during encoding. In silico benchmarking demonstrates its outperforming error resilience capacity against the state-of-art methods and achieving complete binary data recovery from a single sequence copy containing 20% erroneous bases. Gungnir requires neither keeping many redundant sequence copies to address storage degradation, nor high-coverage sequencing to address sequencing error, reducing the overall cost of using DNA for storage.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.