Storing the portrait of Antoine de Lavoisier in a single macromolecule

A pixelated portrait of Antoine de Lavoisier was stored in a digitally-encoded poly(phosphodiester). The storage capacity attained in this work (440 bits/chain) is the highest ever reported for a synthetic informational polymer. To reach this very high capacity, a combination of data compression and polymer design was used. For instance, the digital polymer was synthesized by automated phosphoramidite chemistry using an optimized set of nineteen building blocks (8 coded monomers, 10 mass tags and one alkoxyamine linker enabling decryption by tandem mass spectrometry). Consequently, the polymer could be comprehensively decoded by electrospray mass spectrometry and the portrait of the French chemist was recovered.