Homework

Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices
Homework #1 - Idea: Gene silencing pesticides First, describe a biological engineering application or tool you want to develop and why. My idea is RNAi-based pesticides, also known as gene silencing pesticides. These pesticides are short strands of dsRNA sequences that are converted to siRNA (small interfering RNAs) by an enzyme called Dicer, then integrated into a RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC) as a template strand, which binds to equivalent mRNA strands and cleaves it, blocking the expression of important genes inside pests, therefore killing them. Because RNAi-based pesticides are made out of RNA and not toxic chemicals, they are environmentally non-toxic and naturally degrade over time. RNAi-based pesticides can also be targeted towards certain organisms, only killing harmful pests while leaving other beneficial organisms unaffected.