An interdisciplinary team of summer undergraduate students working as part of the 2024 Summer Mountaintop research experience have won the 'Best Research' Award (tied with two other teams as determined by the judges) at the recently concluded 2024 Lehigh Summer Research Expo held at Lehigh's Mountaintop campus high bay. The team consisted of five students from across multiple disciplines/programs at Lehigh -- Nathan Edmundson (senior CSE), Burhan Gokulp (junior BIOE), Aaron Colon (junior COH/Biostatistics), Sam Correll (senior Comp. Eng.) and Dan Malatesta (junior BIOS).
The team project was entitled "Purple Drop -- an automated DNA computing and data storage platform" and was supervised by Mayuresh Kothare (Professor of ChBE) and former (retired) Lehigh CSE faculty member Dr. Mark Arnold.
The aim of the project was to demonstrate how tools from drop microfluidics built in a programmable microsystem platform could be used for automated and programmable mixing, heating and separation of drops containing synthetic DNA strands, thereby enabling storage and recovery of data. This area of synthetic DNA-based computing has emerged as a promising alternative to silicon-based computing and storage devices that are rapidly reaching theoretical limits of memory storage. In particular, DNA based data storage devices can potentially offer several orders of magnitude higher storage density if the underlying molecular machinery of the DNA fragments can be harnessed for this purpose in an automated fashion.
The team is planning to present the results of their research at the upcoming 30th International Conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming (DNA30), organized under the auspices of the International Society for Nanoscale Science, Computation and Engineering (ISNSCE) to be held in Baltimore, MD from September 16-20, 2024.
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