Homework
Weekly homework submissions:
Professor Jacobson’s Questions Q1: Polymerase Error Rate vs. the Human Genome Raw polymerase error rate: DNA polymerase III (the baseline replicative polymerase) misincorporates roughly 1 in 10^4 to 10⁵ nucleotides during synthesis. I fyou factor in built-in proofreading checkpoints this error rate reduces to about 1 in 10⁷.
Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices
First, describe a biological engineering application or tool you want to develop and why. This could be inspired by an idea for your HTGAA class project and/or something for which you are already doing in your research, or something you are just curious about.
Week 2 HW :DNA Read Write Edit
Molecular Biology 101 1. Nucleotides In Silico Several free tools let you visualize and manipulate DNA/RNA sequences on your computer. Key options: SnapGene Viewer (plasmid maps), NCBI BLAST (sequence alignment), UCSC Genome Browser (reference genomes), and Benchling (all-in-one cloud platform). Benchling is a great starting point — it’s free, browser-based, and lets you import sequences (GenBank, FASTA, or raw), view annotated maps, design primers, run in silico digests, and align sequencing data. It also supports team collaboration and version control.