Affiliation: | 1. Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zurich, Vladimir-Prelog-Weg 1, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland;2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, Houston, TX, 77005 USA Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany;3. Department of Computational Biology and Center for Integrative Genomics, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland Department of Genetics, Evolution & Environment and Department of Computer Science, University College, London, UK |
Abstract: | Today, we can read human genomes and store digital data robustly in synthetic DNA. Herein, we report a strategy to intertwine these two technologies to enable the secure storage of valuable information in synthetic DNA, protected with personalized keys. We show that genetic short tandem repeats (STRs) contain sufficient entropy to generate strong encryption keys, and that only one technology, DNA sequencing, is required to simultaneously read the key and the data. Using this approach, we experimentally generated 80 bit strong keys from human DNA, and used such a key to encrypt 17 kB of digital information stored in synthetic DNA. Finally, the decrypted information was recovered perfectly from a single massively parallel sequencing run. |