Nanofiber-based protection of DNA for archival data storage via coaxial electrospinning and chitosan integration

Abstract DNA is an attractive molecular alternative for dense and durable information storage, which offers immense potential for long-term archival data storage. However, the unprotected DNA molecules may degrade when exposed to factors such as temperature variation, enzyme hydrolysis, and oxidative stress, which results in failure of data recovery. Here, we present a protection scheme that stabilizes DNA using chitosan and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) nanofibers, enabling high-fidelity recovery after long-term storage. Chitosan was used to protect DNA backbone from temperature variations, and PVA nanofibers was used to encapsulate DNA to mitigate external damage such as strand breakage. Accelerated aging experiments showed that the combined chitosan/PVA protection increased the DNA half-life by nearly 30-fold relative to unprotected controls. Specifically, the protected 150-bp DNA exhibited a projected half-life of 97.8 years at 20 °C and 940.5 years at 10 °C. We further validated this approach by encoding textual data into the protected DNA. Sequencing results confirmed high-fidelity recovery of the encoded text. These results indicate that the proposed DNA protection approach provides a promising solution for long-term and reliable DNA storage.