Homework

Weekly homework submissions:

  • Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices

    1. Biological Engineering Application/Tool I Want to Develop I would like to explore developing bioadaptive smart textiles that can dynamically regulate heat and cold based on environmental and bodily signals. The core idea is: a textile that behaves less like fabric and more like a living interface, sensing temperature/humidity (and eventually physiology like skin temp or sweat composition), then changing state the way nature does when it crosses thresholds (like phase transitions: water to ice, or protein conformation shifts). I’m fascinated by systems that compute through material behavior, not just microcontrollers. What draws me to this is the idea of information processing in matter. In synthetic biology, we learn how cells act like computers: inputs, logic, outputs, composable hierarchies. I’m interested in translating that logic into materials - textiles that sense, compute, and respond through their structure, not just software. This would be a distributed system that alters function based on the signals it receives.Beyond clothing, I see this evolving as a platform for designing systems that sit at the intersection of climate, comfort, and human experience - while forcing us to confront what it means to design with materials that are adaptive, persistent, and potentially biological.

  • Week 2 HW: DNA Read Write and Edit

    Part 3: DNA Design Challenge 3.1. Choose your protein. Chosen protein: TlpA (temperature-sensing transcriptional repressor) from Salmonella typhimurium (UniProt: Q56080) Why I chose it: TlpA is a protein “thermometer”: it changes its oligomeric/structural state with temperature, which is exactly the kind of temperature-triggered phase/structure shift that maps conceptually to smart textiles that respond to heat/cold. In synthetic biology, thermosensitive repressors like TlpA are used as temperature-controlled switches (gene expression ON/OFF based on temperature). TlpA_Salmonella_typhimurium protein sequence (FASTA-style; source: UniProt Q56080):