Homework

Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices
Synthetically Grown Natural Indigo: An Inquiry I would like to engineer a bacterium like yeast or E. coli to produce indigo pigment. If this could be achieved, I infer that the scalability of natural indigo production would increase exponentially. This could cut down on water, labor, and space needed for natural indigo production. This process would not be beholden to environmental factors like rain fall, frost prediction, and pest management. Pigment could be produced on an accelerated timeline, as the growth rate for bacteria is much faster than that of bushes or trees; especially when taking into account many indican producing plants need to be started from seed every growing season. Typically natural indigo production yields only two to three harvests per year, and requires labor intensive post processing to return about half of the weight of harvest in usable pigment from aqueous extraction, and slightly less from dried(though it is more shelf stable), (japanese sukomo, west african talaki balls) fermented, then cured indigo this process typically takes three months. These changes could eliminate a pain point that prevents commercial dying endeavours from adopting natural indigo, it’s possible it could decrease the cost of this process significantly.
Week 2 HW: DNA read write and edit
Preliminary Questions: