https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/nitin-vashisht/index.htmlAbout me LinkedIn Homework, Labs, and Projects See the nav bar on the left to look through my work for How To Biomanufacture Almost Anything (Fall 2026)!Hugoenhttps://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/nitin-vashisht/week-01-hw-project-ideas/index.htmlMon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/nitin-vashisht/week-01-hw-project-ideas/index.htmlHTBAA Homework #1: Automated Biomanufacturing as a Discovery Engine for Biosensors Course: How to Biomanufacture (Almost) Anything 2026 Assignment: Homework #1 — Biomanufacturing Proposal Due: Tuesday, September 22 1. What I Want to Biomanufacture, and Why Most biosensor development treats “biomanufacturing” as the last step of the pipeline: once a laboratory has identified a promising aptamer or engineered protein switch, that molecule is scaled up and produced. My proposal inverts that relationship. I want to biomanufacture the biosensors themselves, but as the output of a closed, automated discovery loop in which biomanufacturing infrastructure is also the instrument that generates the data used to train and continually fine-tune the computational model that designs the sensors. In other words, the “product” is twofold: (i) a validated family of nucleic-acid (aptamer) and protein-based biosensors for a target class of analytes, and (ii) a progressively improving, experimentally grounded design model — a lab-in-the-loop system — that gets better at proposing new sensors with each iteration.https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/nitin-vashisht/week-02-hw-dna-design/index.htmlMon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/nitin-vashisht/week-02-hw-dna-design/index.htmlHTBAA Homework #2: DNA Design From an aptamer-biosensor concept (HW1) to a concrete expression construct Prepared by: Nitin Due: Tuesday, 29 September, 2:30 p.m. ET Part 0: Set up in Kernel I do not yet have Kernel access, so I have not created the repository/folder this part asks for, and I want to be upfront about that rather than invent one. What follows is everything Kernel would normally do for Parts 1–4 — pulling real part sequences from public databases, codon-optimizing, checking reading frame, and reasoning about restriction sites and biosecurity screening — done instead with direct database lookups (NCBI/UniProt/Addgene/FPbase) and a short Python script I wrote and ran myself for the codon-optimization and sequence-integrity checks, so that every claim below is checked rather than asserted. Once I do have Kernel access, I would create a repository and a folder named nitin-theo-biosensor (to be renamed to the lastname-project convention once I set it up) and rebuild this design inside it so the part sequences and construct map are backed by Kernel’s own records rather than my manual sourcing.https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/nitin-vashisht/week-03-hw-cell-free/index.htmlMon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/nitin-vashisht/week-03-hw-cell-free/index.htmlHTBAA Homework #3: Designing a Cell-Free Reaction Composition Prepared by: Nitin Due: Tuesday, 6 October 2026 0. Scope, and how this relates to my main project This is a deliberate branch off my HW1/HW2 thread rather than a continuation of it. My main project is a lab-in-the-loop system for discovering aptamer biosensors, and in HW2 I designed a theophylline-riboswitch-gated sfGFP construct to validate the cell-free layer of that pipeline. HW3 fixes the three protein targets (sfGFP, PETase, Reteplase) and fixes the reporter sequence, so the riboswitch design does not transfer directly. What does transfer is the reaction chemistry underneath it: every assay in my pipeline runs in an E. coli lysate CFPS reaction, so a cheaper and more reproducible reaction composition lowers the per-assay cost of my entire HW1 scale estimate. I return to that connection briefly in Section D.https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/nitin-vashisht/final-project/index.htmlMon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/nitin-vashisht/final-project/index.html