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Moon lander mission will carry DNA to the final frontier

Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is prepared for placement within its launch vehicle’s fairing. (Astrobotic Photo)

A mission to send a commercial lander to the moon, set for launch in a couple of days, will bring the fruition of projects that have been in the works for years — including projects that aim to put DNA into cold storage on the final frontier.

Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s robotic Peregrine lander is scheduled to begin a circuitous 40-day trip to the moon with liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:18 a.m. ET Jan. 8 (11:18 p.m. PT Jan. 7). NASA TV will stream coverage of the countdown.

It’ll mark the first launch for United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket, and the first use of the BE-4 engines built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture for Vulcan’s first-stage booster — coming nearly 10 years after the partnership between ULA and Blue Origin was announced.

A successful touchdown next month would go into the history books as the first soft landing of a commercially built spacecraft on the lunar surface — in fact, the first soft lunar landing of any U.S.-built spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972. Among the payloads placed aboard the lander is the Iris mini-rover, which would become the first U.S.-built vehicle to wheel around the moon since the Apollo era.

Several NASA-supported payloads will take measurements at the landing site, around a region known as the Gruithuisen Domes, during a science mission that’s projected to last a couple of weeks. Other payloads include micro-robots from Mexico, an art project called MoonArk, mementos and bits of cryptocurrency.

And then there’s the DNA. Samples of DNA — either contributed by donors or synthesized to contain coded information — will be riding on the Peregrine lander as well as the Vulcan’s Centaur V upper stage.

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Scientists team up to turn cells into tiny recording devices

A small section of a cell lineage map produced using DNA Typewriter. (Allen Institute / UW Image)

The Allen Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the University of Washington have launched a collaboration called the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, with the goal of using genetically modified cells to capture a DNA-based record showing how they change over time.

If the project works out as hoped, it could lead to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind cellular processes — including, for example, how tumors grow — and point to new methods for fighting disease and promoting healthy cell growth.

Over the next five years, the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology will receive $35 million from the Allen Institute, and another $35 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

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Industry alliance aims to advance DNA data storage

Trillions of bytes of data could be stored in the pink smear of DNA at the end of the test tube at right. (Tara Brown Photography / UW)

Microsoft is teaming up with other companies to form an alliance to advance the field of DNA data storage, which promises to revolutionize the way vital records are kept for the long haul.

The founding members of the DNA Data Storage Alliance, unveiled today at the Flash Memory Summit, include Microsoft as well as Twist Bioscience, Illumina and Western Digital. Twist Bioscience has been partnering with Microsoft and the University of Washington for years on projects aimed at harnessing synthetic DNA for data storage.

Microsoft Research and UW’s Molecular Information Systems Lab have already demonstrated a fully automated DNA-based data storage and retrieval system — and in league with Twist, they’ve shown that their system can store a gigabyte of data in a DNA-based archive.

The UW lab is among 10 other organizations that have followed the founders’ lead and joined the alliance.

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Award recognizes research on DNA data storage

Microsoft’s Karin Strauss and the University of Washington’s Luis Ceze have earned the 2020 Maurice Wilkes Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture. (UW Photo)

University of Washington computer science professor Luis Ceze and Microsoft principal research manager Karin Strauss have won a prestigious award from the Association of Computing Machinery for their work on DNA-based data storage systems.

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Artist pays tribute to DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin

Artist Kate Thompson worked samples of synthetic DNA into the ink and acrylic coating for her portrait of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin. (University of Washington Photo / Dennis Wise)

On one level, multimedia artist Kate Thompson’s work shows the black-and-white visage of Franklin — the late biochemist whose famous “Photo 51” revealed the double-helix structure of life’s most vital molecule, even though she didn’t get her full share of credit for it.

Look more closely, and you’ll see a mosaic of 2,000 images submitted by the general public as part of UW’s #MemoriesInDNA project.

And if you were to scrape off a few flakes of paint and process them in a DNA lab, you could read out the pixels that make up all of those images and more, translated from the four-letter genetic code of life to the ones and zeroes of digital data.

“This portrait is not only preserving Franklin’s memory, but preserving the data as well, in a form that will be accessible to future generations,” Karin Strauss, co-director of UW’s Molecular Information Systems Laboratory and principal research manager at Microsoft Research, said today in a news release about the art project.

Thompson’s portrait arguably ranks as the most visual and publicly accessible demonstration of mass data storage in DNA, which has been the focus of study at MISL for years.

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UW, Microsoft join $25M DNA data storage project

All the movies, images and other digital data from more than 600 basic smartphones (10 terabytes) can be stored in the pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube. (Credit: Tara Brown Photography / UW)

The University of Washington and Microsoft will take part in a federally funded effort to develop data storage techniques using synthetic DNA.

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Automated DNA data storage demonstrated

Microsoft and University of Washington researchers built an automated system that was fed by bottles of chemicals to encode date in custom-designed DNA molecules. (Microsoft / UW Image)

DNA data storage holds the promise of putting huge amounts of information into a test tube — but who wants to carry test tubes around a data center all day?

Researchers from Microsoft ahd the University of Washington are working on a better way: a completely automated system that can turn digital bits into coded DNA molecules for storage, and turn those molecules back into bits when needed.

They used their proof-of-concept system, described in a paper published today in Nature Scientific Reports, to encode the word “hello” in strands of DNA and then read it out. That may sound like a ridiculously simple task, but it served to show that the system works.

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Arch Mission gets set to send DNA library to moon

An artist’s conception shows Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander on the lunar surface. (Astrobotic Illustration)

DNA-based data storage systems have been proposed as a theoretical way to preserve information for millennia on the moon, but the idea isn’t so theoretical anymore.

The Arch Mission Foundation says it’s partnering with Microsoft, the University of Washington and Twist Bioscience to send an archive of 10,000 crowdsourced images, the full text of 20 books and other information on Astrobotic’s 2020 mission to the moon.

All of the data for those files will be encoded in strands of synthetic DNA that could easily fit within a tiny glass bead. The Microsoft-UW-Twist team has already demonstrated how the method can be used for efficient storage and retrieval of data files, including an OK Go music video.

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DNA evidence zeroes in on 3 African ivory cartels

Elephant tusks from an ivory seizure in 2015 are laid out in Singapore after they have been sorted into pairs. (Center for Conservation Biology / University of Washington)

DNA evidence and lots of detective work have revealed the networks behind illegal trade in African elephant ivory, centering on three smuggling cartels in Kenya, Uganda and Togo.

The case is laid out in a paper written by a team led by Samuel Wasser, head of the University of Washington’s Center for Conservation Biology, and published today in the open-access journal Science Advances.

Wasser said the findings could figure in a complex case centering on Feisal Mohamed Ali, a reputed ivory kingpin based in Mombasa, Kenya. Feisal was convicted on trafficking charges in 2016 but was set free last month on appeal, due to problems with the evidence that was at hand for the trial.

“Our hope is that the data presented in this paper, and discovered by others, can help strengthen the case against this cartel, and tie Feisal and his co-conspirators to multiple large ivory seizures,” he said.

In addition to the Mombasa cartel, the DNA evidence points to Entebbe in Uganda and Lome in Togo as centers of the illegal African ivory trade.

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Find out how to store your data in DNA

University of Washington researcher Lee Organick (foreground) and Microsoft researcher Yuan-Jyue Chen (background) work in the Molecular Information Systems Lab. (UW Photo / Dennis Wise)

Scientists from the University of Washington and Microsoft are improving their system for preserving digital data in strands of synthetic DNA — and they’re giving you the chance to participate.

The UW-Microsoft team laid out the method in a research paper published this week in Nature Biotechnology.

For the experiment described in the paper, text files as well audio, images and a high-definition music video featuring the band OK Go were first digitally encoded, and then converted into chemical coding — that is, adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine, which make up the ATCG alphabet for DNA base pairs.

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