Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL)

The Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL) at the University of Washington explores the intersection of information technology and molecular-level manipulation using in-silico and wet lab experiments. A partnership between UW Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Microsoft Research, MISL brings together faculty, students and research scientists with expertise in computer architecture, programming languages, synthetic biology, and biochemistry. Data stored in DNA in a test tube. Photo by Tara Brown. Our current focus is on using synthetic DNA for data storage. Using DNA to archive data is an attractive possibility because it is extremely dense, with a raw limit of 1 exabyte per cubic milimeter, and long-lasting, with observed half-life of over 500 years. We are developing a complete system architecture for DNA-backed archival storage, with support for random access and encoding schemes that offer reliability for density trade-offs. Why are we excited about DNA storage? The faint pink smear in the photo can hold over 10 terabytes of data. And it can last for a long time. News April 08, 2020 Katie was interviewed for a podcast about Porcupine – Bioinformatics Chat by Roman Cheplyaka. The episode should be out by the end of the month! March 30, 2020 Congratulations to Karen Zhang for the Goldwater Scholarship and David Wong for the Mary Gates Scholarship! Woo! March 08, 2020 Check out our latest preprint on Porcupine, a molecular tagging system using DNA to tag physical objects and basecall-free nanopore signals for reading! November 11, 2019 Check out our latest preprint on NanoporeTERs, a new class of nanopore-addressable protein reporters for multiplexed detection of cellular outputs using commerically available nanopore sensor arrays! November 10, 2019 Max gave an invited talk at ICCAD 2019 about Puddle! Check out the accompanying paper. July 03, 2019 Check out our latest paper in Nature Communications that demonstrates a new assembly protocol, codec and read-until for DNA data storage using nanopores! Older posts…