back to list

Lecture on DNA as a storage technology by Prof Marc Riedel

2024/03/12 by

As part of the Centre for Synthetic Biology, a lecture by Prof. Marc Riedel will take place on 11.04.2024 at 15:00 in room S3|06 337 at the Department of Computer Systems. The title of the lecture is “DNA Storage: In theory, there's no difference between ”theory“ and ”practice“. But in practice there is.”.

Ever since Watson and Crick first described the molecular structure of DNA, its information-bearing potential has been apparent to computer scientists. With each nucleotide in the sequence drawn from the four-valued alphabet of A, T, C, and G, a molecule of DNA with n nucleotides stores the equivalent of 2n bits of data. In principle, DNA could provide a storage medium that is many orders of magnitude denser than conventional media. Spurred by the biotech and pharma industries, the technology for both sequencing (reading) and synthesizing (writing) DNA has progressed rapidly. Nevertheless, a large gap remains between what is theoretically possible in terms of reading/writing speed and what has been demonstrated in practice. This talk will discuss, broadly, the challenges of building practical DNA storage systems, and specifically algorithms for choreographing droplet movement in the system. It will also discuss ambitious plans to deploy in-memory computing on data stored in DNA. Finally, it will discuss the activities of a startup that the speaker has spun out: an alternative application of DNA storage, namely barcoding molecules with DNA tags for drug discovery.

Biography of the speaker:

Marc Riedel is Oracle Research Fellow and Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He is also a member of the Graduate Faculty in Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology. He has held positions at Marconi Canada, CAE Electronics, Toshiba, and Fujitsu Research Labs. He received his Ph.D. and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Caltech and his B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering with a Minor in Mathematics at McGill University. His Ph.D. dissertation titled “Cyclic Combinational Circuits” received the Charles H. Wilts Prize for the best doctoral research in Electrical Engineering at Caltech. His paper “The Synthesis of Cyclic Combinational Circuits” received the Best Paper Award at the Design Automation Conference. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award.