Enabling global-scale nucleic acid repositories through versatile, scalable biochemical selection from room-temperature archives
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Conventional storage and retrieval of nucleic acid specimens, particularly unstable RNA, rely on costly cold-chain infrastructure and inefficient robotic handling, inhibiting large-scale nucleic acid archives needed for global genomic biobanking. We introduce a scalable room-temperature storage system with minimal physical footprint that enables database-like queries on encapsulated, barcoded, and pooled nucleic acid samples. Queries incorporate numerical ranges, categorical filters, and combinations thereof, advancing beyond previous demonstrations of single-sample retrieval or Boolean classifiers. We evaluate this system on ninety-six mock SARS-CoV-2 genomic samples barcoded with theoretical patient data including age, location, and diagnostic state, demonstrating rapid, scalable retrieval. We further demonstrate storage and sequencing of human patient-derived nucleic acid samples, illustrating applicability to clinical genomic analysis. By avoiding freezer-based storage and retrieval, this approach scales to millions of samples without loss of fidelity or throughput, enabling large-scale pathogen and genomic repositories in under-resourced or isolated regions of the US and worldwide. Large biospecimen banks are limited by a lack of fast, flexible, database-like retrieval. Here, authors encode metadata as DNA barcodes on silica-encapsulated samples and demonstrate numerical range, categorical, and Boolean queries, enabling rapid, precise recall from pooled DNA/RNA archives.
Source: Nature Communications
Language: English
Topic: DNA and Biological Computing
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $6,990
Funders: National Science Foundation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, National Institutes of Health, University of California, San Francisco, Office of Naval Research, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems, Army Research Office
Awards: G1285643167, AF Medium: DNA-based Data Storage and Computing Materials, Graduate Research Fellowship Program, Collaborative Research: Autonomous Computing Materials, G4686538308, G4756830717, G4791082835, G4963465063, G5351157054, DMREF: Computational Design of Next-generation Nanoscale DNA-based Materials, G5464168646, G613990440, FET Medium: Next-generation DNA-based Computing and Memory Materials, SBIR Phase I: Massively scalable storage of nucleic acids using barcoded polymer packets, G7563389667, G7827523863, G8876996369, G9000001142, G9000175394, G9000176275, G9000198953, G9000219151, G9000300833
OpenAlex ID: W7128902685