Chemical and linguistic considerations for encoding Chinese characters: an embodiment using chain-end degradable...

Area of Science:

• Polymer Chemistry
• Information Storage
• Biotechnology

Background:

• Sequence-defined polymers (SDPs) are explored for data storage.
• Tandem mass spectrometry (MS) faces challenges with increasing SDP complexity.
• Chain-end degradation offers a true de novo sequencing approach for large data bases.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the use of oligourethanes for encoding/decoding Chinese characters.
• To evaluate two distinct encoding schemes: Unicode and Zhèng Mă.
• To establish the flexibility and versatility of SDPs for data storage applications.

Main Methods:

• Utilized an in situ consecutive click reaction for writing information onto an oligourethane backbone.
• Employed a chain-end degradation routine for reading the encoded information.
• Applied Unicode (base-16) and Zhèng Mă (base-26) encoding schemes to Chinese characters.

Main Results:

• Successfully encoded and decoded a Confucius proverb written in Chinese characters.
• Demonstrated oligourethanes' adaptability to both Unicode and Zhèng Mă encoding systems.
• Highlighted the trade-off between Unicode's efficiency/uniqueness and Zhèng Mă's robustness with partial data.

Conclusions:

• Oligourethanes are versatile for data storage using diverse encoding strategies.
• The choice of encoding scheme impacts information fidelity and retrievability.
• SDPs show promise for advanced information storage, particularly with logographic scripts.