LDPC Codes for Portable DNA Storage

DNA becomes an attractive storage medium in recent years for its ultra-high density, millennial-long endurance, and efficient replication. In this work we consider DNA storage that uses the affordable and portable nanopore sequencing as the reading mechanics. Unlike traditional data storage systems, errors occur asymmetrically among the four types of nucleotide bases of DNA. Quaternary codes can be employed for error correction, but suffer from high complexity. In this paper, we design binary LDPC codes with a turbo-like decoder for the DNA storage channel. Simulation results show that our binary LDPC codes have a similar bit-error rate but with a speed up by a factor of 4 compared to quaternary codes.