The Board of Trustees of The University of Illinois Assigned Patent

The Board of Trustees of The University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, has been assigned a patent (11538554) developed by Milenkovic, Olgica, Urbana, IL, Hernandez, Alvaro Gonzalo, Champaign, IL, Tabatabaei, Seyed Kasra, Urbana, IL, and Zhao, Huimin, Champaign, IL, for a “nick-based data storage in native nucleic acids.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “Nick-based methods, devices, and systems for nick-based data storage in a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequence are disclosed. Digital information is encoded in a register of at least one copy of a double-stranded DNA sequence having a plurality of nickable positions. The data is translated into a sequence of values from a nick alphabet that is subsequently mapped to the plurality of nickable positions, and the DNA sequence is nicked according to the mapped values. Because the digital information is encoded as a series of nicked and non-nicked positions of a double-stranded DNA sequence, the nucleotide sequence of the DNA can be non-synthetic, or ‘native’ DNA.”

The patent application was filed on 2018-09-19 (16/136066).