Olgica Milenkovic, UIUC
DNA macromolecules have been successfully used in the past to implement a number of computational primitives and demonstrate the potential of molecular computing. Recently, it has also emerged that DNA may be used as a data storage media, since DNA macromolecules offer extremely large storage density, high data integrity and at the same time, allow for extremely efficient content replication. The storage media and accompanying computational, reading, writing, accessing and replication processes differ significantly from those encountered in classical storage systems. As a result, new analytical, computational and implementation issues arise that can only be solved by extending and combining concepts in bioinformatics, theoretical computer science and coding theory. The goal of this presentation is to introduce the audience to modern DNA synthesis systems, high throughput and third generation sequencing devices and DNA editing techniques as well as new theoretical developments in tagged sequence alignment, reconstruction of sequences from traces and constrained deletion-correction coding.