Molecular data systems have the potential to store information at dramatically higher density than existing electronic media. Some of the first experimental demonstrations of this idea have used DNA, but nature also uses a wide diversity of smaller non-polymeric molecules to preserve, process, and transmit information. In this paper, we present a general framework for quantifying chemical memory, which is not limited to polymers and extends to mixtures of molecules of all types. We show that the theoretical limit for molecular information is two orders of magnitude denser by mass than DNA, although this comes with different practical constraints on total capacity. We experimentally demonstrate kilobyte-scale information storage in mixtures of small synthetic molecules, and we consider some of the new perspectives that will be necessary to harness the information capacity available from the vast non-genomic chemical space.

中文翻译：

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小分子混合物中信息存储的原理。

分子数据系统有潜力以比现有电子媒体高得多的密度存储信息。这个想法的一些最初的实验演示使用了DNA，但是自然界也使用各种各样的较小的非聚合分子来保存，处理和传输信息。在本文中，我们提出了一种量化化学记忆的通用框架，该框架不仅限于聚合物，还可以扩展到所有类型分子的混合物。我们表明，分子信息的理论极限是质量上比DNA密度高两个数量级，尽管这对总容量有不同的实际限制。我们通过实验证明了小合成分子混合物中千字节规模的信息存储，