Stabilizing synthetic DNA for long-term data storage with earth alkaline salts

Rapid aging tests (70 °C, 50% RH) of solid state DNA dried in the presence of various salt formulations, showed the strong stabilizing effect of calcium phosphate, calcium chloride and magnesium chloride, even at high DNA loadings (>20 wt%). A DNA-based digital information storage system utilizing the stabilizing effect of MgCl2 was tested by storing a DNA file, encoding 115 kB of digital data, and the successful readout of the file by sequencing after accelerated aging.ISSN:1359-7345ISSN:1364-548

Template-Particle Stabilized Bicontinuous Emulsion Yielding Controlled Assembly of Hierarchical High-Flux Filtration Membranes

A novel solvent-evaporation-based process that exploits template-particle stabilized bicontinuous emulsions for the formation of previously unreached membrane morphologies is reported in this article. Porous membranes have a wide range of applications spanning from water filtration, pharmaceutical purification, and battery separators to scaffolds for tissue engineering. Different situations require different membrane morphologies including various pore sizes and pore gradients. However, most of the previously reported membrane preparation procedures are restricted to specific morphologies and morphology alterations require an extensive optimization process. The tertiary system presented in this article, which consists of a poly­(ether sulfone)/dimethylacetamide (PES/DMAc) solution, glycerol, and ZnO-nanoparticles, allows simple and exact tuning of pore diameters ranging from sub-20 nm, up to 100 nm. At the same time, the pore size gradient is controlled from 0 up to 840%/μm yielding extreme asymmetry. In addition to structural analysis, water flux rates of over 5600 L m^–2 h^–1 are measured for membranes retaining 45 nm silica beads