Crosslinked Porous Protein Crystals with Guest Barcode DNA

Marking materials with a unique symbol, tattoo, or signature is a common technique for monitoring product flow through supply chain, maintaining product inventory, assessing authenticity, and determining product age.

Barcodes are often included on an external, visual label of most materials/goods which can be later scanned for downstream monitoring, but which also can provide an opportunity for subversive duplication.

For some applications, ideal ‘barcodes’ should remain visually undetected, greatly increasing the difficulty of illicitly reading and copying the unique signature. DNA barcodes can be used in these applications and possess a much higher information capacity than most currently used barcodes. However, DNA by itself is sensitive to degradation and finding a carrier mechanism to allow the DNA to be protected and transported is a key need.

The protein crystal can be loaded with DNA that was synthesized to have a custom, readable identifier. The DNA is protected within the pores of the crystals and studies have shown successful extraction of the DNA strands from the crystals. DNA can be removed selectively and without destroying the crystal, allowing the crystal to potentially be reused or have continued use, depending on the application. This is an important variation from other techniques to use DNA for tracking that fully encapsulate the DNA, but then must destroy the encapsulation to read the barcode. Other advantages of protein crystals are their biocompatibility, and biodegradability over time. These DNA loaded protein crystals have been successfully used to track mosquitos as part of disease vector research. The barcoded crystals persisted throughout mosquito development when ingested by larvae and did not significantly affect adult mosquito survivorship.