Nanopore Deciphering Single Digital Polymers Towards High‐Density Data Storage

Sequence‐defined polymer is one of the most promising alternative media for high‐density data storage. It could be used to alleviate the problem of insufficient storage capacity of conventional silicon‐based devices for the explosively increasing data. To fulfil the goal of polymer data storage, suitable methods should be developed to accurately read and decode the information‐containing polymers, especially for those composed by a combination of the natural and unnatural monomers. Nanopore‐based approaches have become one of the most competitive analysis and sequencing techniques, which are expected to read both natural and synthetic polymers with single‐molecule precision and monomeric resolution. Herein, this work emphasizes the advances being made in nanopore reading and decoding of information stored in the man‐made polymers and DNA nanostructures, and discusses the challenges and opportunities towards the development and realization of high‐density data storage. The emerging nanopore techniques have been validated as the promising low‐cost analytical and sequencing methods towards practical applications of high‐density polymer data storage. This concept discusses the nanopore‐based data storage systems based on polymer sequences and DNA nanostructures, and highlights the advances in nanopore processing and decoding of information stored in man‐made polymers containing unnatural monomer units.