Decoding of Nanopore-sequenced synthetic DNA storing digital images

Digital media explosion has led to an exponential increase of the amount of data generated worldwide and the need for new means of storage able to keep up with the current growth of digital information has become a critical challenge. During the last decade, DNA has been proven to be a potential candidate thanks to its biological properties allowing to store information at high density (215 petabytes in 1 gram) for centuries. In previous works we have presented an end-to-end storage workflow specifically designed for the efficient storage of images onto synthetic DNA and proven its feasibility in a wetlab experiment in which sequencing was performed using the Illumina machine. In this work we are studying the sequencing using rather the MinION sequencer on the same data after being stored in a sealed capsule for two years. MinION is a very promising sequencer although introducing a much higher error rate in the process of reading. In this paper, we propose a solution to deal with the MinION sequencing noise allowing to recover the original stored data.