Homework
Weekly homework submissions:
Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices
Does the option: Option 1 Option 2 Option 3 Enhance Biosecurity • By preventing incidents • By helping respond Foster Lab Safety • By preventing incident • By helping respond Protect the environment • By preventing incidents • By helping respond Other considerations • Minimizing costs and burdens to stakeholders • Feasibility? • Not impede research • Promote constructive applications title: ‘Week 1 HW: Principles & Practices’ weight: 10 Introduction and Motivation This week emphasized that biological engineering is not only about what we can build, but how and why we choose to build it. The lectures and recitation highlighted that ethics, safety, and governance should not be treated as external constraints applied after a technology is developed, but rather as integral design dimensions from the earliest stages of a project.
Week 2 HW: DNA Read, Write, & Edit
Part 0 — Gel Electrophoresis Basics (Concepts) This week, I reviewed how gel electrophoresis turns a DNA “mixture” into an interpretable pattern. In an agarose gel, DNA fragments migrate toward the positive electrode because DNA is negatively charged, and smaller fragments travel farther through the gel matrix than larger ones. A DNA ladder provides a size reference so unknown bands can be estimated in base pairs. When a restriction enzyme digest is performed, the DNA sequence is converted into a predictable set of fragment lengths, and those fragments appear as bands at specific positions. Band brightness is roughly related to how much DNA mass is in that fragment (longer fragments can look brighter if molar amounts are similar). Overall, the key idea is that restriction digests plus gels let you “read out” a cutting pattern, validate identity, and compare designs or conditions in a simple visual way.
Automated two-color agar art using Opentrons OT-2 and design validation with simulation.