PSY355H5 Final: Introduction to Genetics - Identifying genes and their funtions
Document Summary
The first step towards identifying and characterizing a gene is to isolate it from the rest of the genome and produce a large enough quantity of it to allow its investigation. Gene cloning is the process of isolating and amplifying a specific gene or dna fragment. The example here describes the basic steps involved in the conventional way of cloning a dna fragment using bacteria. In this case, the dna fragment containing the gene of interest was isolated from the entire genome by using specific enzymes, so called restriction enzymes. These are specialized enzymes that allow the site specific cutting of the dna at a particular sequence. The dna fragment is then inserted into a so called vector, something like a mini chromosome and introduced into bacteria. As the bacteria multiply the vector with the dna is also multiplied to produce many copies of this dna that can then be isolated in large quantity from the bacteria.
