[goldenrules]

> The researchers' biggest worry was that DNA synthesis and sequencing made mistakes as often as 1 in every 100 nucleotides. This would render large-scale data storage hopelessly unreliable — unless they could find a workable error-correction scheme. Could they encode bits into base pairs in a way that would allow them to detect and undo the mistakes? “Within the course of an evening,” says Goldman, “we knew that you could.”

how does this work? are the mistakes consistent enough that we can design encodings that rely upon them?

[witty_username]

FEC (0) basically adds extra information that can be used to fix errors. A simple scheme is to just duplicate all the info (like a backup), but there are much more clever schemes which are much more efficient.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction

[pronoiac]

Check the "making memories" infographic midway down the article. One part is that they transcribe the data four times, another is that they only use three of four bases at a certain point. There's probably more checksums though.