For both, there is a trade-off between synthetic difficulty, material demands, and information capacity. Writing (encoding) information at the molecular level can be achieved with either (i) sequences of monomers concatenated within one molecular string 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 or with (ii) mixtures of individual, unique compounds 19, 20, 21, 22, 23.
To achieve this at the molecular level will require adapting the molecular systems to be more compatible with macroscopic information technologies. In contrast, modern civilization demands to communicate information wirelessly and repeatably, in an effort to identify and track objects 13, 14, monitor health 15, 16, and eventually merge the digital with the living 17, 18. Unfortunately, the current methods of reading often result in the destruction of the molecules. Thus, alternative synthetic polymers have been proposed for information encoding 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. However, the principle of molecular recognition that works well within a biological microenvironment is difficult to connect with technology built primarily around the electromagnetism of inorganic materials and RF communication. Indeed, humans learned to hack the system of nucleic acids for the purpose of encoding data 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
The information capacity of molecules is enormous and very tempting for technological applications. All known life forms depend on nucleic acids, which are in essence digital medium. Managing digital information is crucial not only for our civilization but for the existence of life itself. Future optimized systems can conceivably provide 64-bit (~10^19 codes) or higher encoding to cover the labelling needs in drug discovery, anti-counterfeiting and other areas. A prototype molecular system capable of 16-bit (65,535 codes) encoding is presented. The codes are readable by nuclear magnetic resonance in the radiofrequency (RF) spectrum, analogously to the macroscopic technology of RF identification. Multiplexing of the encoded molecules provides a high number of codes that grows double-exponentially with the number of available paramagnetic ions. Owing to the directional character of magnetic susceptibility tensors, each sequence of lanthanides built into one molecule produces a unique magnetic outcome.
4 elements ii special edition level code#
Here we show that magnetic patterns can be synthetically encoded into stable molecular scaffolds with paramagnetic lanthanide ions to write digital code into molecules and their mixtures. Molecules offer immense potential to serve for this purpose, but our ability to write, read, and communicate molecular code with current technology remains limited. Digitalization of our environment requires an ever growing number of objects to be identified and tracked with machine-readable labels. Contactless digital tags are increasingly penetrating into many areas of human activities.