Hi! I am Alexandra, an MIT senior majoring in Mechanical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience. I am interested in using synthetic biology to improve materials in medical settings. Specifically, I hope to integrate biosensing and biomaterials to improve current treatments that require implants.
Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices
Assignment (Week 2 Lecture Prep) Homework Questions from Professor Jacobson: [Lecture 2 slides] Nature’s machinery for copying DNA is called polymerase. What is the error rate of polymerase? How does this compare to the length of the human genome. How does biology deal with that discrepancy? Polymerase has 1:106 error rate, while the human genome is 3x109 base pairs. This is dealt with by exonuclease proofreading, followed by postreplication mismatch repair that looks for erros.
Polymerase has 1:106 error rate, while the human genome is 3x109 base pairs. This is dealt with by exonuclease proofreading, followed by postreplication mismatch repair that looks for erros.
Human proteins are around 400-500 amino acids long, and in average each amino acid can be encoded by ~3 different sequences, which would give 3400 different codes. However, some codons are actually preferred over others, bringing this number down.
The 10 essential amino acids are histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, valine), and arginine. Vertebrates are not able to synthesize these amino acids, so the Lysine Contigency makes no sense since there wouldn’t be any change and the dinosaurs should be able to get Lysine with any regular diet.
