Coding in 2D: Using Intentional Dispersity to Enhance the Information Capacity of Sequence-Coded Polymer Barcodes

A 2D approach was studied for the design of polymer-based molecular barcodes. Uniform oligo(alkoxyamine amide)s, containing a monomer-coded binary message, were synthesized by orthogonal solid-phase chemistry. Sets of oligomers with different chain-lengths were prepared. The physical mixture of these uniform oligomers leads to an intentional dispersity (1st dimension fingerprint), which is measured by electrospray mass spectrometry. Furthermore, the monomer sequence of each component of the mass distribution can be analyzed by tandem mass spectrometry (2nd dimension sequencing). By summing the sequence information of all components, a binary message can be read. A 4-bytes extended ASCII-coded message was written on a set of six uniform oligomers. Alternatively, a 3-bytes sequence was written on a set of five oligomers. In both cases, the coded binary information was recovered.