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DNA-LCEB: a high-capacity and mutation-resistant DNA data-hiding approach by employing encryption, error correcting codes, and hybrid twofold and fourfold codon-based strategy for synonymous substitution in amino acids

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Abstract

Data-hiding in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences can be used to develop an organic memory and to track parent genes in an offspring as well as in genetically modified organism. However, the main concerns regarding data-hiding in DNA sequences are the survival of organism and successful extraction of watermark from DNA. This implies that the organism should live and reproduce without any functional disorder even in the presence of the embedded data. Consequently, performing synonymous substitution in amino acids for watermarking becomes a primary option. In this regard, a hybrid watermark embedding strategy that employs synonymous substitution in both twofold and fourfold codons of amino acids is proposed. This work thus presents a high-capacity and mutation-resistant watermarking technique, DNA-LCEB, for hiding secret information in DNA of living organisms. By employing the different types of synonymous codons of amino acids, the data storage capacity has been significantly increased. It is further observed that the proposed DNA-LCEB employing a combination of synonymous substitution, lossless compression, encryption, and Bose–Chaudary–Hocquenghem coding is secure and performs better in terms of both capacity and robustness compared to existing DNA data-hiding schemes. The proposed DNA-LCEB is tested against different mutations, including silent, miss-sense, and non-sense mutations, and provides substantial improvement in terms of mutation detection/correction rate and bits per nucleotide. A web application for DNA-LCEB is available at http://111.68.99.218/DNA-LCEB.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by ICT R&D, Pakistan research grant project; ICTRDF/TR&D/2012/62-DEWS and COMSTECH-TWAS Joint Research Grants Program for Young Scientist; 12-216 RG/ITC/AS-C; UNESCO FR: 3240270865. We also thank Mr. Khurram Jawad for his help in improving the write-up of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Ibbad Hafeez

  2. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS), Nilore, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Ibbad Hafeez, Asifullah Khan & Abdul Qadir

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  1. Ibbad Hafeez
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  2. Asifullah Khan
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  3. Abdul Qadir
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Correspondence to Asifullah Khan.

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Hafeez, I., Khan, A. & Qadir, A. DNA-LCEB: a high-capacity and mutation-resistant DNA data-hiding approach by employing encryption, error correcting codes, and hybrid twofold and fourfold codon-based strategy for synonymous substitution in amino acids. Med Biol Eng Comput 52, 945–961 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-014-1194-2

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