The international DNA nanotechnology meeting, DNA25, was held this year in Seatlle, Washington on the University of Washington campus. This is the annual gathering of researchers interested in all aspects of DNA computation, and this year there was a focus on the use of DNA as a potential alternative to silicon as an information storage medium. Surprisingly, it may soon be cheaper to store archival data as nucleotides (GATC) rather than as digital flips in a memory core. Key issues that remain to be solved include how to access and easily read out the data, a problem that was considered in depth by another University of Texas at Austin researcher, David Soloveichik of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. In addition to delivering a talk on manipulation xenonucleic acids (XNAs) for computational applications, Dr. Ellington participated in a panel on the future of the field (see picture). This panel included Dr. Ned Seeman, widely regarded as the founder of DNA nanotechnology; Shelley Wickham of the University of Sydney; Anne Condon, from the University of British Columbia; and William Shih of the Wyss Institute at Harvard.
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