Unit 6 Reflection

Unit 6 was about biotech and its various applications. It involves changing the living world by manipulating the DNA of living organisms. There are four applications of biotech, industrial, agricultural, diagnostic, and medical.

Some biotech practices are controversial, and that brings up some people's bioethics, which is what they feel is wrong and right in the biotech field. If faced with ha bioethical question, one should consider the pros and cons of each side, and try to come up with another solution if they can.

One type of biotech is recombinant DNA, which is DNA that has been altered. To do this, you need the gene that you want to insert, a restriction enzyme to cut the gene out of the DNA, and to cut the plasmid once, which is another thing you need, and you need ligase, which reattaches the genes. Recombinant DNA can be used to make large amounts of a protein like insulin. First you put the gene of interest into the organism, get a plasmid, digest the DNA, then add ligase to reattach them, mix the recombinant plasmid with the bacteria, grow the bacteria on a plate with the antibiotic it is naturally resistant to, and then extract and purify the protein, according to my notes.

Some other technologies of biotech are polymerase chain reaction, gel electrophoresis, and DNA sequencing. Polymerase chain reactions are used to make lots of copies of DNA. To do this, you need a strand of DNA that you want to duplicate, and you must denature it with heat, then add primers above and below the region of interest, and then you use DNA polymerase to extend the primers, according to my notes. Gel electrophoresis is used to identify the approximate length of strands of DNA. DNA is put into wells at the end of a gel, and a current is run through it, and the DNA is drawn towards the positive charge. Known DNA strands are used as a template to measure the length. Sequencing is determining the sequence of DNA. Special bases with dyes attached are used do replicate the DNA strand one base at a time. Then a computer analyzes it to find the order of the base pairs.

The set-up for gel electrophoresis

We did a lab on recombinant DNA in E. Coli bacteria, which you can find here: http://markbiologyblog.blogspot.com/2016/01/pglo-lab.html
to summarize what we did, we added modified plasmids to E. Coli bacteria that made them glow green when in contact with arabanose sugar, and let the multiply.

Mice modified to glow due to the pGLO gene. It is sometimes used as an indicator to make sure that a gene was taken in by an organism.