Homework
Weekly homework submissions:
Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices
HW1 Ultra-efficient DNA Synthesis Machine My research is on designing a DNA synthesis machine that can reduce the cost and time to produce long strands of arbitrary DNA sequences. Right now we’re aiming for megabase strands of DNA but the goal of the project is to eventually get to the Gb range and establish a technology that can scale and improve similar to transistors in Moore’s Law. For context, I work mostly on the mechanical side and hope to learn more about the biochemistry and synthetic biology in general from this class.
Week 2 HW: DNA Read, Write, and Edit
HW2 Part 1: Benchling & In-silico Gel Art This week, we made gel electrophoresis art using Lambda phage DNA and ten restriction enzymes. Gel electrophoresis uses a positive charge to pull negatively charged DNA through a conductive gel. Longer strands move slower and shorter strands move faster meaning that different lengths of DNA fragments will appear as different bars in your gel. To use this in an artistic context we take our input Lambda DNA and cut it to different lengths using different restriction enzymes which allows us to have coarse control over where these bars end up and thus we can make art with it. I have decided to really commit to my favorite animal, turtles, this semester and try to have a turtle-inspired theme to all of my projects. In an ideal world this is what I wanted my gel art to look like.
HW3 Lab Preparation: Opentrons Artwork This week, we programmed the Opentrons liquid handling robot to create fluorescent protein masterpieces. I was really looking forward to this lab and even did last week homework about expressing GFP in E.Coli. Rather than using the GFP, I found we used a variety of different colors of superfluorescent proteins. Ronan’s webtool [1] made it really easy to visualize a design, and we could even upload images to serve as a template for our designs. I decided to go all in on turtles and make a turtles all the way down image featuring a turtle with a globe for its shell. This was the original image, from my collection of Turtle CADS: