Homework

Weekly homework submissions:

• Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices

  • First, describe a biological engineering application or tool you want to develop and why. Over the counter pre-formulated bio-kit, acting as a binding agent and/or stabiliser for specific food waste for homemade biomaterials and textiles. Is there a way I could engineer a biological tool that acts as a binding agent or key ingredient (like a powder or gel) that could be added to specific food waste (e.g. eggshells or coffee waste) to stabilize and turn them into biomaterials and textiles? Would they then preserve the longevity of the materials? Can they then be reused in another way when discarded or act as food for plants? How can they be upscaled? Are they affordable to students and people on a budget?

• Week 2 HW: DNA Read, Write & Edit

  Homework Questions from Professor Jacobson: 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? Longest Human Proteins (PKS): >100kbp Chemical Synthesis: (Open Loop Protection Group) Error rate: 1:102 Throughput: 300 S per Base Addition. This can be corrected with Biological Synthesis (Error Correcting Polymerase) How many different ways are there to code (DNA nucleotide code) for an average human protein? In practice what are some of the reasons that all of these different codes don’t work to code for the protein of interest? 3..? (Sorry I will pay attention to week 2 lecture, need to look into this at a slower pace)