Contactless digital tags are increasingly penetrating into many areas of human activities. Digitalization of our environment requires an ever growing number of objects to be identified and tracked with machine-readable labels. Molecules offer immense potential to serve for this purpose, but our ability to write, read, and communicate molecular code with current technology remains limited. Here we show that magnetic patterns can be synthetically encoded into stable molecular scaffolds with paramagnetic lanthanide ions to write digital code into molecules and their mixtures. Owing to the directional character of magnetic susceptibility tensors, each sequence of lanthanides built into one molecule produces a unique magnetic outcome. Multiplexing of the encoded molecules provides a high number of codes that grows double-exponentially with the number of available paramagnetic ions. The codes are readable by nuclear magnetic resonance in the radiofrequency (RF) spectrum, analogously to the macroscopic technology of RF identification. A prototype molecular system capable of 16-bit (65,535 codes) encoding is presented. Future optimized systems can conceivably provide 64-bit (~10^19 codes) or higher encoding to cover the labelling needs in drug discovery, anti-counterfeiting and other areas.

Department of Experimental Neurobiology National Institute of Mental Health Topolová 748 250 67 Klecany Czech Republic

Department of Inorganic Chemistry Faculty of Science Charles University Prague Hlavova 2030 8 128 43 Prague 2 Czech Republic

Department of Organic Chemistry Faculty of Science Charles University Prague Hlavova 2030 8 128 43 Prague 2 Czech Republic

Department of Organic Chemistry University of Chemistry and Technology Prague Technická 5 166 28 Prague 6 Czech Republic

Faculty of Mechatronics Informatics and Interdisciplinary studies Technical University of Liberec Hálkova 917 6 460 01 Liberec Czech Republic

Forensic Laboratory of Biologically Active Substances Department of Chemistry of Natural Compounds University of Chemistry and Technology Prague Technická 5 166 28 Prague 6 Czech Republic

Institute of Biophysics and Informatics 1st Faculty of Medicine Charles University Prague Salmovská 1 120 00 Prague 2 Czech Republic

Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the CAS Flemingovo náměstí 542 2 160 00 Prague 6 Czech Republic

MR Unit Department of Radiodiagnostic and Interventional Radiology Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine Vídeňská 1958 9 140 21 Prague 4 Czech Republic

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