BIOCH330 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Sigma Factor, Ribonuclease, Deoxyribonuclease

• School: University of Alberta
• Department: Biochemistry
• Course: BIOCH330
• Professor: Andrew Macmillan

Document Summary

Take a piece of dna and lab with radioactive label typically p32. Enzymatically added to one end of the dna and then take the dsdna and treat with dnase. Dnase randomly chops up dna small fragments. We can do that on the native dna and we can get a whole pool of fragments of dna of di erent sizes depending on enzymes etc. Can also do that experiment in the presence of transcriptional manner. Now a di erent pattern of cutting because transcriptional machinery bound to the dna will protect the dna to be cut. Dna cannot cut where th transcriptional machinery is bound. Gap where transcriptional machinery is bound: this is called the footprint. No gap in the middle: promoter region. There are multiple di erent sigma factors in the bacterial cell that associates with rna polymerase. Sigma factors dictate the speci city of a polymerase for a speci c promoter.