Promiscuous molecules for smarter file operations in DNA-based data storage

DNA holds significant promise as a data storage medium due to its density, longevity, and resource and energy conservation. These advantages arise from the inherent biomolecular structure of DNA which differentiates it from conventional storage media. The unique molecular architecture of DNA storage also prompts important discussions on how data should be organized, accessed, and manipulated and what practical functionalities may be possible. Here we leverage thermodynamic tuning of biomolecular interactions to implement useful data access and organizational features. Specific sets of environmental conditions including distinct DNA concentrations and temperatures were screened for their ability to switchably access either all DNA strands encoding full image files from a GB-sized background database or subsets of those strands encoding low resolution, File Preview, versions. We demonstrate File Preview with four JPEG images and provide an argument for the substantial and practical economic benefit of this generalizable strategy to organize data.