R&D: New Construction of Balanced Codes Based on Weights of Data for DNA Storage

IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing has published an article written by Xiaozhou Lu, and Sunghwan Kim, Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering, University of Ulsan, Ulsan, South Korea.

Abstract: “As maintaining a proper balanced GC content is crucial for minimizing errors in DNA storage, constructing GC-balanced DNA codes has become an important research topic. In this paper, we propose a novel code construction method based on the weight distribution of the data, which enables us to construct GC-balanced DNA codes. Additionally, we introduce a specific encoding process for both balanced and imbalanced data parts. One of the key differences between the proposed codes and existing codes is that the parity lengths of the proposed codes are variable depending on the data parts, while the parity lengths of existing codes remain fixed. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed codes, we compare their average parity lengths to those of existing codes. Our results demonstrate that the proposed codes have significantly shorter average parity lengths for DNA sequences with appropriate GC contents.“