Homework

Weekly homework submissions:

• Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices

  Homework Questions from Professor Jacobson: Q: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? A:Polymerase makes an error about 1 in 10⁶ DNA letters. The human genome is about 3.2×10⁹ letters, so that would be ~3,200 errors per full copy if nothing else helped. Cells fix this with proofreading during copying and mismatch repair afterward.