Recently, <Chemical Society Reviews>, a top review journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, published online a review article written by Ruijiao Dong’s research group from Shanghai Center for Systems Biomedicine at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, entitled "Digital synthetic polymers for information storage" (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/D2CS01022D). This tutorial review focuses on recent advances in digital synthetic polymers for data storage. They summarize their salient features, including encoding, decoding, editing, erasing, encrypting and repairing according to different kinds of polymers.

Digital synthetic polymers with uniform chain lengths and defined monomer sequences have recently become intriguing alternatives to traditional silicon-based information devices or natural biomacromolecules for data storage. The structural diversity of information-containing macromolecules endows the digital synthetic polymers with higher stability and storage density but less occupied space. Through subtly designing each unit of coded structure, the information can be readily encoded into digital synthetic polymers in a more economical scheme and more decodable, opening up new avenues for molecular digital data storage with high-level security.

In this rapidly developing information age, the high-throughput technology for writing, reading and storing information is becoming more and more demanding. Accompanied by the limitations of traditional silicon-based information devices already in sight, intensive attention has been paid to chasing alternatives for data storage. Digital synthetic polymers show extraordinary talents in every aspect of efficiently encoding, decoding, editing, erasing, encrypting, and repairing data, and undoubtedly become promising alternatives for a new class of molecular-level data storage devices. Much progress has been made so that the chemical structure of digital synthetic macromolecules could be easily altered and adapted to different kinds of applications, such as data storage, molecular informatics, molecular identification, coded product tags and anti-counterfeiting technologies. It should be pointed out that ultrahigh-molecular-weight macromolecules may not necessarily be required in the aforementioned applications. For example, 2D molecular barcodes containing a set of sequence-coded oligomers were adopted for product identification to circumvent the challenges of writing and reading the data in polymers. The sequence-coded oligomers/polymers can be applied to labelling high-value products in order to distinguish them from counterfeits.

In spite of a blooming development of digital synthetic polymers, they still locate at a very early stage, compared to the well-established electrical, optical, and magnetic storage devices. For practical applications, there are many technological gaps remaining to bridge in either writing or reading mechanisms. The preparation of digital synthetic polymers is typically time-consuming and hardly achieved in large scale, leading to a relatively high cost. Inexpensive commodity compounds as coded units can be utilized to construct the macromolecular information carriers and the scale-up synthesis of digital synthetic polymers could be accomplished via the development of an automated synthesis platform in the combination of robotic technologies and flow chemistry, which may synergistically reduce the cost of encoding information in the sequence-coded macromolecules. Moreover, the decoding of digital synthetic polymers is heavily dependent on mass spectrometry techniques. Although these sequencing instruments need merely be purchased once, they are still bulky and greatly expensive. In the meantime, the macromolecules would be destructive during MS/MS sequencing, and the analysis takes a large amount of time. To even these gaps, the development of a new smaller non-destructive decoding device, such as nanopore sequencing, becomes extremely urgent. Additionally, the exploitation of cheap hand-held sequencing instruments should also be taken into account. It is imaginable that with persistent efforts of scientists towards the analytical and synthetic chemistry, these challenges will be overcome in the near future and new pathways to impel digital synthetic polymers to real-life applications will be opened up.

The first authors of this article are Dr. Li Yu and doctoral student Baiyang Chen, doctoral students Ziying Li and Qijing Huang are co-authors, and the corresponding authors are Researcher Ruijiao Dong, Dr. Yue Su and Dr. Li Yu. Shanghai Jiao Tong University is the first institution. This work is sponsored by the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars (Overseas), the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai, etc.

Research Group Introduction

Ruijiao Dong, male, Ph.D., Researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (PI), Doctoral supervisor, the Group Leader of the "Precision Biomaterials", sponsored by the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars (Overseas), Shanghai High-Level Overseas Talents Introduction Program, Jiangsu Province "333 High-level Talent Development Project" Plan, etc. Dong’s group focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of cancers, including the controlled fabrication of advanced functional polymeric materials, and their applications in a range of fields such as drug/gene/protein delivery and bioimaging. The research scope of Dong’s group mainly involves polymer chemistry, material science and biomedicine, etc. In recent year, they have published more than 30 SCI papers in chemistry- or materials-relevant international journals, including Science、Nature、Nature Chemistry、Advanced Materials、Chem. Soc. Rev.、Acc. Chem. Res.、Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.、ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, etc. Some of them have been selected as ESI Highly Cited Papers and the Most-Accessed Articles of the year, and some of them have been recognized by international academic peers and reported as research highlights by Science, PHYS.ORG, MIRAGE news, IChemE, ACS Noteworthy Chemistry, etc. In recent years, he has led and participated in more than 10 national and provincial research projects, and set up Exactmer Ltd. in London in 2019 as a co-founder and Advanced Sequence Materials Science and Technology Ltd. in Jiangsu in 2021 as a founder.

Article Link:

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2023/CS/D2CS01022D