Homework
Weekly homework submissions:
Week 1 HW.1: Principles and Practices
- Describe my biological engineering project Describe a biological engineering application or tool I want to develop and why. I propose to engineer a strain of soil bacteria (likely Bacillus subtilis, a common benign soil bacterium) to act as a “search and sequester” tool for agricultural soil. Heavy metal contamination (like Arsenic and Lead) in soil is a major global issue because plants absorb these toxins, which then end up in our food.
Week 1 HW.2: Week 2 Preparation
Homework Questions from Professor Jacobson 1. 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? Polymerases have an initial error rate of roughly 1 in 104 to 105 nucleotides, which is extremely high compared to the ~3 billion 3 * 109 base pairs in the human genome. Without correction, this would lead to 100,000+ errors per cell division. Biology manages this through intrinsic proofreading exonucleases (reducing errors to 1 in 107 ) and post-replication mismatch repair, resulting in a final, remarkably low mutation rate of approximately 1 in 109 to 1010 per base pair per generation.
Week 1 HW.3: Setting up Website
https://pages.htgaa.org/2026a/arucha-khematharonon/ Might customize this more soon.