Homework
Weekly homework submissions:
Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices
1.First, describe a biological engineering application or tool you want to develop and why. As a pharmacy student, I have become increasingly interested in how drugs move from an initial idea to clinical use, and how many potential compounds fail long before they could reach patients. Drug development is an expensive and time consuming subject, and an ethically complex process, specifically in early stages. But many drugs are left behind as they fail to show strong enough effects or because the costs for further testing is too high.
Week 2 HW: DNA- Read, Write and Edit
Pre-Lecture HW: 1.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? The error rate of polymerase estimates to be made errors once every 10x4–10x5 nucleotides polymerized. This compared to the length of the human genome that’s approximately 3.2 billion base pairs long, that would account up to 32 thousand mutations every time a single cell divided. Biology fixes this gap with multiple systems that check for these errors. Its first system is proofreading; a function found in most polymerases. When they add a wrong base, they recognize this error, backtrack and fix it cutting the wrong base and replacing it. Another way, is mismatch repair (NMR), after polymerase is done, a second group of proteins scan the new DNA for any remaining errors.
I designed a drawing with the website that was made available to us https://opentrons-art.rcdonovan.com/. It made it easier to get used to the way the points would be done inside the plate to create our art. Personally I decided to create a flower, took the exact points for each color, green (sfGFP) and red (mrFP1). I integrated the points to the base code, and customized it for the design to be possible, especially with the high quantity of points and the limit of the 20ul pipette.
Week 4 HW: Protein Design Part 1
PART A: CONCEPTUAL QUESTIONS 1.How many molecules of amino acids do you take with a piece of 500 grams of meat? (on average an amino acid is ~100 Daltons) 2.Why do humans eat beef but do not become a cow, eat fish but do not become fish? 3.Why are there only 20 natural amino acids? 4.Can you make other non-natural amino acids? Design some new amino acids.