Encoding information in synthetic metabolomes

Biomolecular information systems offer exciting potential advantages and opportunities to complement conventional semiconductor technologies. Much attention has been paid to information-encoding polymers, but small molecules also play important roles in biochemical information systems. Downstream from DNA, the metabolome is an information-rich molecular system with diverse chemical dimensions which could be harnessed for information storage and processing. As a proof of principle of small-molecule postgenomic data storage, here we demonstrate a workflow for representing abstract data in synthetic mixtures of metabolites. Our approach leverages robotic liquid handling for writing digital information into chemical mixtures, and mass spectrometry for extracting the data. We present several kilobyte-scale image datasets stored in synthetic metabolomes, which can be decoded with accuracy exceeding 99% using multi-mass logistic regression. Cumulatively, >100,000 bits of digital image data was written into metabolomes. These early demonstrations provide insight into some of the benefits and limitations of small-molecule chemical information systems.