A Modified Watermark Synchronisation Code for Robust Embedding of Data in DNA

DNA data embedding is a newly emerging field aspiring to encode
data in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA is an inherently
digital and noisy medium, undergoing substitution, insertion and
deletion mutations. Hence, encoding information in DNA can be
seen as a particular case of digital communications in which biological
constraints must be observed. In this paper we propose a modification
of Davey and MacKay’s watermark synchronisation code
(unrelated to digital watermarking) to create an encoding procedure
more biocompatible with the host organism than previous methods.
In addition, when combined with a low density parity check (LDPC)
code, the method provides near-optimum error correction. We also
obtain the theoretical embedding capacity of DNA under substitution
mutations for the increased biocompatibility constraint. This result,
along with an existing bound on capacity for insertion and deletion
mutations, is compared to the proposed algorithm’s performance by
means of Monte Carlo simulations