Week 11 — Bioproduction & Cloud Labs

Part A Collective Artwork

  1. Unfortunately I missed the deadline to contribute to the artwork becuase I missed the notification email and the deadline had passed before recitation when I realized what had happened.
  2. This is a cool project and I wish I had been able to participate. I did listen to go to the webiste and listen to others discuss in reciation. Based on what I heard it seems like one potential improvement is that everyone was only “given” one pixel, but it is not clear to me how a coherent picture would arise if each student actually only had one pixel. It sounded like what happened is that some people just took over parts of the canvas so they could draw coherenet pictures. The pictures were nice, but it seems like this could be confusing? Maybe the canvas should be totally locked so that each person can only edit their pixel/area so the picture is totally self organizing, or have some kind of scheme to partition out larger spaces to groups/volunteers who then draw the main sketch but leave certain pixels that people can color as they wish (or choose amonhst a smaller set of colors), i.e. like choosing between two colors for the skin of animal to see if stripes or spots or chaos appear spontaneously.

Part B Cell-Free Protein Synthesis

Referencing the cell-free protein synthesis reaction composition (the middle box outlined in yellow on the image above, also listed below), provide a 1-2 sentence description of what each component’s role is in the cell-free reaction.

  • E. coli Lysate

    • Includes the ribsomes and enzymes needed to transcribe DNA and manfufacture proteins.
    • BL21 (DE3) Star Lysate (includes T7 RNA Polymerase): I

  • Salts/Buffer

    • Keep pH in accetpable range for biological reactions and provides magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus

  • Potassium Glutamate

  • HEPES-KOH pH 7.5

  • Magnesium Glutamate

  • Potassium phosphate monobasic

  • Potassium phosphate dibasic

  • Energy / Nucleotide System

    • Provides raw components to assemble into DNA and provide energy for ATP production.
    • Ribose
    • Glucose
    • AMP
    • CMP
    • GMP
    • UMP
    • Guanine

  • Translation Mix (Amino Acids)

    • Provide amino acidds that can be attached to tRNA and assembled into target proteisn
    • 17 Amino Acid Mix
    • Tyrosine
    • Cysteine

  • Additives

    • Nicotinamide

  • Backfill

    • Hydrates the system in a way that won’t degrade the DNA that is exposed to water
    • Nuclease Free Water