Computationally Inspired Biotechnologies: Improved DNA Synthesis and Associative Search Using Error-Correcting Codes and Vector-Quantization

. The main theme of this paper is to take inspiration from methods used in computer science and related disciplines, and to apply these to develop improved biotechnology. In particular, our proposed improvements are made by adapting various information theoretic coding techniques which originate in computational and information processing disciplines, but which we re-tailor to work in the biotechnology context. (a) We apply Error-Correcting Codes, developed to correct transmission errors in electronic media, to decrease (in certain contexts, optimally) error rates in optically-addressed DNA synthesis (e.g., of DNA chips). (b) We apply Vector-Quantization (VQ) Coding techniques (which were previously used to cluster, quantize, and compress data such as speech and images) to improve I/O rates (in certain contexts, optimally) for transformation of electronic data to and from DNA with bounded error. (c) We also apply VQ Coding techniques, some of which hierarchically cluster ..