Homework

Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices
Questions from Professor Jacobson: 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 standard polymerase error rate is 1:1 000 000. Human genome is around 3.2 Gbp = 3.2 x 10^9. Therefore, the copying of full human genome “at once” would yield around 3200 errors (mutations) - some silent and non-significant, some causing serious development and health issues. To avoid so many mistakes passing through the MutS repair system scans the DNA after replications, identifies the mismatched base pairs and trigger wrong sequence excision and re-copying of the fragment.
Week 2 HW: DNA read, write and edit
DNA READ What DNA would you want to sequence (e.g., read) and why? This could be DNA related to human health (e.g. genes related to disease research), environmental monitoring (e.g., sewage waste water, biodiversity analysis), and beyond (e.g. DNA data storage, biobank). I would like to sequence genomic DNA of the some strains of Antarctic bacteria I study in my PhD. I’m interested in them for new species characterization, enzyme discovery and extremozyme evolution purposes.