Homework

Week 1 Post-Lecture HW: Principles and Practices
Assignment: Post-Lecture 1 First, describe a biological engineering application or tool you want to develop and why. This could be inspired by an idea for your HTGAA class project and/or something for which you are already doing in your research, or something you are just curious about.
Week 2 Pre-lecture & Post-lecture HW: DNA Read, Write, and Edit
Assignment Pre-Lecture 2 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 error rate for polymerase is 1:106. The human genome is ~3.2 billion base pairs (3.2 x 109). Biology deals with this discrepancy by bridging the gap using a multi-step quality control system to lower the error rate to 1:10^9. How many different ways are there to code (DNA nucleotide code) for an average human protein? In practice what are some of the reasons that all of these different codes don’t work to code for the protein of interest?