Nanopore Deciphering Single Digital Polymers Towards High-Density Data Storage

Sequence-defined polymer is one of the most promising alternative media for high-density data storage. It could be used to alleviate the problem of insufficient storage capacity of conventional silicon-based devices for the explosively increasing data. To fulfil the goal of polymer data storage, suitable methods should be developed to accurately read and decode the information-containing polymers, especially for those composed by a combination of the natural and unnatural monomers. Nanopore-based approaches have become one of the most competitive analysis and sequencing techniques, which are expected to read both natural and synthetic polymers with single-molecule precision and monomeric resolution. Herein, this work emphasizes the advances being made in nanopore reading and decoding of information stored in the man-made polymers and DNA nanostructures, and discusses the challenges and opportunities towards the development and realization of high-density data storage.