Prestigious Grant for Technion Researchers: Towards a Complete System for Storing Information on DNA

Researchers from the Technion have won the prestigious EIC Pathfinder grant from the European Union. The entire grant totals some 4 million Euros, of which 1.5 million Euros will be allocated to research done at the Technion.

Prof. Eitan Yaakobi

The research is led by Professor Eitan Yaakobi and Professor Zohar Yakhini, who are the research coordinators of the project. Both are members of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science. Profs. Yaakobi and Yakhini are both experts in DNA data storage, a field that is considered one of the most promising directions in the world of information, since a single gram of DNA may serve to store enormous amounts of information when properly encoded. Considering the dizzying increase in the volume of information in the world, there is a constantly increasing need for a cheap, compact, and non-polluting alternative.

Prof. Zohar Yakhini

Server farms (the “cloud”) not only consume about 3% of global electricity today, but also “contribute” about 2% overall carbon emissions to the atmosphere. The DNA alternative, on the other hand, provides significant miniaturization (six to ten orders of magnitude), retention of the information for a much longer time and negligible energy cost.

The basic idea is as follows: in an artificial process (synthesis), DNA molecules are produced that contain information in different sequences of the four letters of the language of heredity – the nucleotides, marked with the letters, G, C, A, and T.

To read the information, sequencing of the DNA is required, a relatively simple process whose cost decreases year by year. The research of Profs. Yakhini and Yaakobi addresses the synthesis process itself, which is the main challenge in the field. The grant is intended to support the two researchers and their partners in the development of advanced methods for the synthesis of artificial DNA that will be faster, cheaper, and more accurate. In addition, the research will also address issues such as privacy and information security and applications in the field of cryptography.

The other researchers on the project are Antonia Wachter-Zeh and Prof. Reinhard Heckel from TUM, Prof. Mark Somoza from the LSB Institute at TUM, Prof. Robert Grass from ETH Zurich, and Prof. Kunal Masania from TU Delft.

The EIC Pathfinder grants support researchers who develop new and ground-breaking technologies that carry significant impact potential, as well significant risk (High Risk, High Gain). Last year, Technion researchers Prof. Boaz Pokroy and Prof. Ester Segal won the grant for the development of technology that will protect agricultural crops.

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