Scientific American highlights Milenkovic's DNA-based data storage research

6/1/2016 Julia Sullivan, ECE ILLINOIS

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Olgica Milenkovic has been quoted in Scientific American discussing DNA-based storage for digital data.

Written by Julia Sullivan, ECE ILLINOIS

EPP/MechE Professor Ed Rubin has been quoted in EnergyWire discussing the possibility of capturing carbon emissions released from controlled test facilities to turn into a viable product, the goal of a four-year-long competition called the Carbon XPRIZE. According to Rubin, “Additional CO2 is needed to make the CO2 into something else. In many cases, with today’s fuel mix, that balance actually aggravates CO2.” - See more at: https://engineering.cmu.edu/media/mentions/#sthash.eScWTKVL.dpuf
EPP/MechE Professor Ed Rubin has been quoted in EnergyWire discussing the possibility of capturing carbon emissions released from controlled test facilities to turn into a viable product, the goal of a four-year-long competition called the Carbon XPRIZE. According to Rubin, “Additional CO2 is needed to make the CO2 into something else. In many cases, with today’s fuel mix, that balance actually aggravates CO2.” - See more at: https://engineering.cmu.edu/media/mentions/#sthash.eScWTKVL.dpuf

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Olgica Milenkovic has been quoted in Scientific American discussing DNA-based storage for digital data. According to Milenkovic, “DNA is an unbelievably dense, durable, nonvolatile storage medium.”

The article explains, "Humans will generate more than 16 trillion gigabytes of digital data by 2017, and much of it will need to be archived. Think: legal, financial and medical records as well as multimedia files." Current methods of data storage are limited by physical space and inevitable deterioration.

Milenkovic and her colleagues have successfully stored the Wikipedia pages of six U.S. universities in DNA and used random access (as opposed to sequential) to retrieve and edit text. Milenkovic explained, this direct access eliminates the need to "sequence a whole book to read just one paragraph."


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This story was published June 1, 2016.