This week we profile a recent publication in Nature Communications from the laboratory of
Dr. Luis Ceze at the University of Washington School of Computer Science and Engineering.
Can you provide a brief overview of your lab’s current research focus?
Our lab explores the intersection of computing and biotech for new applications. Our current flagship project is a UW/Microsoft collaboration on developing a complete system for DNA-based data storage (device pictured above).
What is the significance of the findings in this publication?
In our latest paper in Nature Communications we demonstrated the ability to use digital microfluidics to retrieve spatially isolated samples of dehydrated DNA organized in a dense array. Think of it of a large library of samples stores in lots of tiny dots and droplets of water move around and retrieve them by soaking them up and moving them to where they need to go, e.g, to a sequencer.
What are the next steps for this research?
Further integration into our encoding-synthesis-sequencing-decoding pipeline.
This research is funded by:
We are generously funded by Microsoft, National Science Foundation and DARPA.