Plasmid

organism. Restriction enzymes are bacterial enzymes that find restriction sites and cleaves DNA. restriction enzymes and DNA ligase are utilized to produce recombinant DNA molecules. DNA ligase catalyzes formation of 3′ and 5′ end phosphodiester bonds. Plasmids are extrachromosomal DNA molecules capable of independent…

“I don’t know” I can still distinctly recall my eleven-year-old self repeatedly saying to anyone who tried to talk to me. It was my first day of school in America and that was the only sentence I could put together in English. I was born in China and lived there my whole life until my mother decided to move to New York. I thought I was just visiting her for winter break, but she dropped me off at school just a week after my arrival. As my new classmates tried to talk to me, I can see their…

use, the real issue was the staphylococcal poison. This led to determining the set of 2 transposons (TSST-1 and beta-lactamase) linked to the new staph strain. Therefore concluding that possibly the TSS outbreak followed a unique event in which a plasmid that carried both transposon sets was absorbed into a staph bacterium under conditions that were ideal for rapid multiplication. After this discovery, one could take comfort in light of the fact that the disease was curable if rapidly diagnosed…

Question 1A: Compare and contrast the general structure of a virus and a bacterium. Bacteria and viruses both do not contain a DNA enclosing nucleus; however, these organisms differ greatly in the complexity of their structures. Generally a bacterium is encompassed within a semi-rigid cell wall made of peptidoglycan, which provides structural support. It is classified as gram positive if its cell wall is thick and stains purple when tested for identification. If its cell wall is thin and stains…

shooter entailing the arduous adventure of Jack (the player character). Jack is trapped in Rapture after his airplane explodes over the city and comes to find that the city was brought to ruin on New Year’s Eve 1958 by gene altering powers known as “plasmids” that mutate the user over time. He must fight the mutated inhabitants through this dystopia and intervene in a power struggle between the Ayn Rand-esque Andrew Ryan and his seemingly righteous foe Atlas. Bioshock is one of the most…

In recent years the field of virology has seen substantial growth as virus have now become a more widely researched subject. It was not too long ago relatively speaking that viruses were more or less an unknown entity, as many facts about viruses were unknown to the days researchers. Now however much more is known about what viruses are and how they work; more importantly it is known that viral agents are one of the leading causes of disease. Once it was established that they did in fact…

Designer babies are believed to be the future of modern biotechnology and medicine. The world has seen a few successful cases, but the welfare of these children is still governed by the country’s regulatory authorities. While this novel invention provides several advantages to parents for selecting specific traits, it has also received wide criticism for the same purpose. One of the reasons for the development of PGD was to prevent genetic and inherited diseases. Genetic screening can…

The purpose of the research was to potentially find a new bacteria that is capable of producing an antibiotic against one or more of the six ESKAPE pathogens (a group of pathogens that are resistant to most if not all current antibiotics). All research protocol was based on the Yale Small World Initiative and the third edition of Microbiology Laboratory Theory & Application. One bacteria from a sample of soil collected (colony #18) was tested for its ability to produce antibiotics against two of…

Different gene silencing methods are being used in biomedical research for the development of potential disease therapeutics. Most of these methods are similar in that they involve the disabling of mRNA by preventing it from being translated into a protein. They differ in the type of molecule used to disrupt mRNA. Due to these differences, each silencing method has specific advantages and disadvantages. Two of the most currently understood methods of gene silencing are RNA interference…

Alongside CRISPR-Cas9 in site specific genome editing are ZFNs and TALENs. ZFNs are a DNA-binding motif assembled as ββα that utilizes a roughly thirty amino acid protein with DNA recognizing amino acids at the alpha helix (Gaj, Gersbach, & Barbas, 2013). These groups of amino acids usually recognize DNA in segments of three. This does not present much specificity in a genome. Therefore multiple DNA-binding motifs need to be combined to create specificity and result in highly specific…