LONG TRAN — HTGAA Spring 2026
About me
I’m Long Tran, a media artist working with gamified installations and system design, where interaction becomes a kind of digital spirituality. My work centers on emergence—how simple rules grow into complex meaning—and on the boolean convergence of symbolic systems and computation, especially through the shared logic of the I Ching, code, and DNA.
Across past projects, I’ve built experiences through rule-based engines, cellular automata, and responsive environments—treating systems not just as tools, but as the artwork itself.
I’m learning bioengineering to explore biology as an expressive medium: to extend divination and symbolic logic beyond screens, and into living processes that can compute, transform, and speak back.
Contact info
Homework
WEEK 2 LECTURE PREP Homework Questions from Professor Jacobson:
- Polymerase’s error rate is 1: 10⁶ bases (10 ⁻⁶ per base). The human genome is ~3.1 × 10⁹ to 3.3 x 10⁹ bp, so at that rate we’d expect ~3.1-3.3 × 10³ (~3,000) errors per genome copy. Biology handles this with layered error correction: polymerase proofreading plus post-replication repair (especially mismatch repair) and other DNA repair/checkpoints, which together drive the effective error rate much lower.
- An average human protein is about 1036 bp (~345 codons), and because the genetic code is redundant (many amino acids have multiple codons), there are a huge number of different nucleotide sequences that can still encode the same protein sequence. However, many of these recoded sequences don’t work well in practice because changing codons changes the DNA/RNA’s GC% and base-pairing strength (A/T ~ −1.2 vs G/C ~ −2.0 kcal/mol), which can drastically change minimum free energy secondary structure; some sequences fold into structures that make expression or stability worse, so a lot of possible codes aren’t actually good choices for expressing the protein you want.
Homework Questions from Dr. LeProust:
- The most commonly used method is solid-phase oligonucleotide synthesis using phosphoramidite chemistry
- Direct synthesis struggles past ~200 nt because each base-addition step can fail a little, and over hundreds of steps those small failures pile up into lots of errors and many incomplete (“truncation”) products, so the amount of correct full-length oligo drops a lot. Additionally, the effective error situation gets much worse at that baseline scale (it explicitly contrasts 1:3,000 nt vs. 1:200 nt) and shows truncation products when pushing longer syntheses.
- You can’t make a 2000 bp gene by direct oligo synthesis because chemical synthesis is only dependable for much shorter lengths (on the order of a few hundred nucleotides), and beyond that the reaction produces lots of errors and truncated (incomplete) products, so the chance of getting a correct, full-length 2000 bp molecule becomes vanishingly small. That’s why longer DNA is made by assembling it from shorter pieces (gene fragments/oligos) rather than synthesizing the whole 2000 bp in one go.
Homework Questions from George Church:
- The way I connect these two is pretty simple: lysine being “essential” means animals already can’t make it and have to get it from outside—food, microbes, the whole ecosystem. So the “lysine contingency” idea (engineer something to need lysine so it can’t survive outside) sounds clever, but it’s kind of backwards in an animal world, because lysine isn’t some rare lab-only thing. It’s literally a normal dietary requirement that the environment is already structured to provide. That makes lysine-dependence a weak containment strategy, and it pushes me to take biocontainment more seriously—like making the organism dependent on something that doesn’t exist in nature, not a basic nutrient every animal already relies on.