Storage has been a fundamental need for every life on the planet. For example, Ants store food and Humans store data. Life has chosen DNA to store the blueprint of life. Storage is also a basic computing primitive. Unless you store the data, you cannot process it. The representation of information can give you a different format for data storage. Humans are storing data from a very ancient time. Modern Humans are generating data every day from digital media such as cameras, internet, phone, sensors and there is a pressing need for a technology that can store this data in the dense storage medium. It is predicted that soon the data generated will be in the order of geopbytes (1 geopbyte = 1 billion exabytes and 1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes) from the Internet of Things. At present to store such big data we need large space, and it is very costly. Synthetic data storage seems to be the right technology emerging on the horizon. In 2013, scientists showed how to store data on synthetic DNA with storage capacity of 2.2 petabytes on one gram of DNA. One can store 455 exabytes of data on one gram of DNA. This course gives an overivew of recent work in this new emerging area of DNA based data storage. See below a course syllabus and the full contents of the course are available at YouTube.  

Syllabus 

Lecture 1: Introduction to DNA Storage and Course Policy
Lecture 2: Introduction to Codecs: Background Mathematics (1)
Lecture 3: Introduction to Codecs: Background Mathematics (2)
Lecture 4: Introduction to Codecs: Background Mathematics (3)
Lecture 5: Introduction to Codecs: Background Mathematics (4)
Lecture 6: Introduction to Codecs: Background Mathematics (5)
Lecture 7: DNA Storage Codecs: Golay SubCode Codec
Lecture 8: DNA Storage Codecs: Constrained Codes
Lecture 9: DNA Storage Codecs: Hamming Codes and Background on Finite Fields
Lecture 10: DNA Storage Codecs: Reed Solomon Codes and Grass Codec
Lecture 11: DNA Storage Codecs: XOR Encoding, Reed Solomon Codes, BCH Codes
Lecture 12: DNA Storage Codecs: DNA Codes with Multiple Constraints
Lecture 13: DNA Storage Codecs: Forward Error Correction and Conflict Free DNA strands
Lecture 14: Secrets of Life: Molecular Biology (1)
Lecture 15: Secrets of Life: Molecular Biology (2)
Lecture 16: Secrets of Life: Molecular Biology (3) and Bio-operations on DNA
Lecture 17: DNA Fountain Codec (1)
Lecture 18: DNA Fountain Codec (2)
Lecture 19: DNA Fountain Codec (3)
Lecture 20: DNA Fountain Codec (4)
Lecture 21: JPEG DNA Standard
Lecture 22: DNA Crytography (1)
Lecture 23: DNA Crytography (2)
Lecture 24: DNA Crytography (3)
Lecture 25: DNA Origami Crytography
Lecture 26: DNA Sequencing (reading)
Lecture 27: DNA Synthesis (writing)