Optimizing the Decoding Probability and Coverage Ratio of Composite DNA

Abstract: This paper studies two problems that are motivated by the novel recent approach of composite DNA that takes advantage of the DNA synthesis property which generates a huge number of copies for every synthesized strand. Under this paradigm, every composite symbols does not store a single nucleotide but a mixture of the four DNA nucleotides. The first problem studies the expected number of strand reads in order to decode a composite strand or a group of composite strands. In the second problem, our goal is study how to carefully choose a fixed number of mixtures of the DNA nucleotides such that the decoding probability by the maximum likelihood decoder is maximized.