Kern Systems

﻿Kern Systems is developing a scalable DNA data storage infrastructure. The suggested types applications for their DNA data storage would include precious personal data, forensic data storage molecule for traceable quality control in food, textiles or pharmaceuticals, and big data. 
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﻿Co-Founder and CEO Henry H. Lee has systems and synthetic biology expertise and developed the first demonstration of enzymatic DNA synthesis for data storage at Harvard Medical School. Co-Founder George M. Church is a Harvard/MIT professor who made foundational contributions to DNA sequencing and researches in the areas of synthetic biology and genome engineering. 
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Timeline

June 3, 2019

﻿Terminator-free template-independent enzymatic DNA synthesis for digital information storage﻿
Henry H. Lee, Reza Kalhor, Naveen Goela, Jean Bolot & George M. Church 
Nature Communicationsvolume 10, Article number: 2383 (2019)
A kinetically controlled system is described that uses TdT to catalyze the linkage of naturally occurring nucleoside triphosphates (dNTPs) to synthesize customized DNA strands with short homopolymeric extensions. Information is encoded in transitions between non-identical nucleotides, rather then in each nucleotide. A codec was devised and demonstrated to support accurate data retrieval from imperfectly synthesized strands and mathematically evaluate the parameters affecting the storage capacity of the system. DNA strands are synthesized that carry 144 bits.