Homework
Weekly homework submissions:
Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices
- First, describe a biological engineering application or tool you want to develop and why. I’m curious about cellular agriculture and lab-grown meat. in this project im proposing to develop a living, light-activated scaffold that produces and spatially distributes oxygen inside a growing tissue. this is one of the needed early steps toward making a thick, steak-like cut rather than thin sheets or ground meat. Today, animal cells grown for food struggle beyond a few millimeters because oxygen and nutrients don’t diffuse well. the interior becomes starved and dies unless you add complex and expensive hardware. My project reframes that bottleneck as a biological engineering opportunity: a biofabricated “breathing” matrix that couples geometry + metabolism so that illumination drives localized oxygen generation and makes it visible and tunable. In this course’s context it would be explored as a living installation: a translucent scaffold whose oxygen field can be visualized in real time under light/dark cycles, producing both data and an intuitive, aesthetic demonstration of how engineered living materials might reduce reliance on expensive hardware in future cultivated-meat systems.
Week 2 HW: dna read write edit
for this week’s HW assignment I’ve chosen the protein mCherry. mCherry is a protein that expresses in red flourescent light emmitance. Fusing it to another protein will enable use to discern wheter the ‘other’ protein is expressed, by visibly observing the red flourescent light. essentially, mCherry functions as a global process visualisation tool across multiple SynBio applications. Googling mCherry Protein I arrived at the uniprot.org database where I’ve obtained the mCherry sequence: