Hotaku Komatsu — HTGAA 2026
Hotaku Komatsu
Welcome to my How To Grow Almost Anything (HTGAA) Spring 2026 workspace. This is where I document my journey through synthetic biology.
About me
I am a student in the HTGAA 2026 course, exploring the intersection of technology and biology.
Info
Contact info
Homework
- Week 1: Principles and Practices Class Assignment 1. Application or Tool to Develop & Why Application: “The Bio-Puzzle” – A hardware-agnostic DNA assembly toolkit using split-protein reporters (e.g., Split-GFP) as physical “checksums” for long-sequence construction.
- Week 2: DNA Read, Write, and Edit Part 1 & 2: Gel Art Describe your process of creating Gel Art using Benchling and restriction digests.
- Week 3: Lab Automation Lab Automation assignment This week, we explored lab automation and its applications in synthetic biology.
- Week 4: Protein Design I This week, we explored the fundamentals of protein structure, visualization, and the latest ML-based tools for design and analysis.
- Week 5: Protein Design II This week focuses on designing and evaluating therapeutic peptides for SOD1 mutant A4V, a key player in familial Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).
- Week 6: DNA Assembly This week explores the experimental design and in-silico simulation of constructing genetic circuits. The first section details standard molecular cloning techniques like PCR and Assembly, whilst the second section documents my modeling results in Asimov Kernel.
- Week 7: IANNs & Fungal Materials This week covers two advanced synthetic biology paradigms: Intracellular Artificial Neural Networks (IANNs) for complex logical decision making, and the engineering of macro-scale Fungal Materials.
Labs
- Week 3 Lab: Opentrons Art Opentrons Art Lab In this lab, we used the Opentrons OT-2 liquid handling robot to create “art” by pipetting colored liquids into a 96-well plate.