# Writing and storing high-density information inside liquids

**Source**: https://bsse.ethz.ch/news-and-events/d-bsse-news/2025/12/writing-and-storing-high-density-information-inside-liquids.html
**Parent**: https://bsse.ethz.ch/news-and-events/d-bsse-news.html?AUTHOR=Q2Fyb2xpbiBBcm5kdCBGb3BwYQ&path=L2NvbnRlbnQvc3BlY2lhbGludGVyZXN0L2Jzc2UvZGVwYXJ0bWVudC9lbi9uZXdzLWFuZC1ldmVudHMvamNyOmNvbnRlbnQvcGFyL25ld3NmZWVkXzQzMTg

Scientists from the Bioanalytics group led by Petra Dittrich have introduced a groundbreaking approach for writing information inside liquids – an advance that could reshape data storage, materials design, and biochemical sensing. Published this week in *Advanced Materials*, the study presents “liquid-in-liquid printing,” a technique that arranges thousands of microscale droplets into precisely patterned, information-rich arrays.

Liquids naturally hold enormous chemical complexity, but leveraging that complexity for information storage has long been limited by diffusion, which rapidly blurs spatial chemical patterns. The new method overcomes this by printing water-in-oil microdroplet “pixels”, each with a meticulously defined composition and location. These pixelated arrays can be arranged with high resolution and tight spacing, effectively turning a sheet of liquid into a chemical display.\
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 Using various encoding schemes, the researchers demonstrated the storing of images, QR codes, alphanumeric characters, and even full words, all precisely embedded biochemically in droplets. Importantly, these patterns are stable, preserving information that would normally dissolve away.

> “In the spirit of our department, this advance was enabled by truly multidisciplinary teamwork and innovation across both engineering and science.”
>
> Maximilian Breitfeld, Robert Strutt and Leonard Fröhlich, D-BSSE Bioanalytics Lab and shared first-authors of the publication

The printed liquid arrays can be reversibly shifted between dissolved and crystallised states. This enables a unique mode of biochemical encryption and decryption, a physical, reversible phase switch for hiding or revealing encoded data. The team also implemented foundational computational principles, such as error correction, information-storage and even how information accessibility can be programmed via biochemical reaction patterning.\
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 By establishing such control over the writing, preserving, and modification of information within liquids, the work sets a new precedent for high-density liquid-phase materials design. This opens new possibilities in information theory, soft matter engineering, microfluidics, and biological assays – practically any field where precise manipulation of liquid composition is essential.

This technology is patented and was [nominated for the Spark Award 2025](https://bsse.ethz.ch/news-and-events/d-bsse-news/2025/10/developing-drugs-with-tens-of-thousands-of-miniscule-droplets-on-a-small-glass-plate.html); a spin-off is in the pipeline.

## Find the publication in *Advanced Materials:*

Breitfeld, M., R. Strutt, L. Fröhlich, C. L. Dietsche, S. Bargfrede, and P. S. Dittrich (2025) [external page Liquid-in-liquid prints: High-density biochemically encoded information preserved in microdroplet arrays.](https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202516338?af=R) *Advanced Materials*, https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202516338

Learn about research in the [Bioanalytics group led by Petra Dittrich](https://dittrich.ethz.ch/).