Dagstuhl-Seminar — Coding Theory and Algorithms for Emerging Technologies in Synthetic Biology

The progress in understanding genes and genomes has given a boost to the use of synthetic DNA for biological and technological applications. Synthetic nucleic acids play a central role in synthetic biology and in emerging therapeutic paradigms, e.g., genome editing and nucleic acid vaccines. DNA-based data storage is making significant progress, and thanks to its extreme data-density, its high durability and its timelessness, it is promising to be the next standard for data archival systems. Synthetic biology and the use of synthetic DNA for information storage applications bring important algorithmic and data analysis challenges. In synthetic biology, reagent and assay design are often driven by algorithmic approaches. Novel synthesis technologies offer cost-reduction by several orders of magnitude at the cost of increased error-rate, raising new coding-theoretic questions. This Dagstuhl Seminar aims to bring together leading biologists, chemists, engineers, computer/data scientists, and theoreticians working on synthetic biology and on DNA-based data storage, to enable joint work in small groups leading to discussing and exploring recent advancements and current challenges.