Homework

Weekly homework submissions:

  • Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices

    1. A biological engineering application or tool I want to develop and why: I want to develop an engineered consortium of microorganisms for pilot-scale biomanufacturing on Mars. The microbes will be engineered for self-sufficent surival subject to the multitude of constraints of the red planet. This insitu resource utilization (ISRU) will be a key step towards the goal of the eventual colonization of Mars, by reducing the import from Earth. The current methods of ISRU, although in their rudimentary stages, rely on high energy chemical conversion process. My application aims at providing an alternative to this, and pave way for sustainable biomanufacturing away from the Earth.

  • Week 2 HW: DNA Read, Write, and Edit

    Part 1: Benchling & In-silico Gel Art 1.1 Restriction Digestion Simulation in Benchling: 1.2 DNA Gel Art Using Automation Art: Part 2: Laboratory Work on Gel Electrophoresis Skipped due to lack of access to lab.

  • Week 3 HW: Lab Automation

    1. Opentrons Art: Code: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1EMIMzVtB1k32tNOAKxGJH9ZDrxwvAGkC JSON file: Download Opentrons art JSON Acknowledgements: This format of coding (uploading a JSON file that contains the coordinates) was inspired from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5nR0eYHLEk&t=4s. Huge thanks to Alireza Hekmati. Coding, in its entirity, was handled by Gemini version 3.0 that was in-built in Collab. Output:
  1. Find and describe a published paper that utilizes the Opentrons or an automation tool to achieve novel biological applications. The paper: Slowpoke:An Automated Golden Gate Cloning Workflow for Opentrons OT‑2 and Flex