Digital polymers with precisely arranged binary units provide an important option for information storage. This is especially true if the digital polymers are assembled in a device, as it would be of great benefit for data writing and reading in practice. Herein, inspired by the DNA microarray technique, the programmable information storing and reading on a mass spectrometry target plate is proposed. First, an array of 4-bit sequence-coded dithiosuccinimide oligomers is efficiently built through sequential thiol-maleimide Michael couplings with good sequence readability by tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS). Then, toward engineering microarrays for information storage, a programmed robotic arm is specifically designed for precisely loading sequence-coded oligomers onto the target plate, and a decoding software is developed for efficient readout of the data from MS/MS sequencing. Notably, short sequence-coded oligomer chains can be used to write long strings of information, and extra error-correction codes are not required as usual due to the inherent concomitant fragmentation signals. Not only text but also bitimages can be automatically stored and decoded with excellent accuracy. This work provides a promising platform of digital polymers for programmable information storing and reading.
Keywords: digital polymers; information storage; microarrays; synergetic cleavages; tandem mass spectrometry; thiol-maleimide couplings.
© 2022 Wiley-VCH GmbH.