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2007-02-11 09:11:22 · 1 answers · asked by bilalo2002 1 in Science & Mathematics Biology

1 answers

Depends on the organism you are planning to engineer.

Bacteria is pretty easy, you can just transform with a plasmid. Fungi are also amenable to this.

Plant are a tougher, but you can take advantage of a bacteria called Agrobacterium tumefaciens, which makes a habit of sticking DNA into the chromosomes of its hosts. You simply replace the agro DNA with the DNA you are interested in and the bacteria will do the job for you. However, not all plant species host agro, so other methods such as DNA bombardment are used, where the DNA is crudely blasted into leaf tissue, and hopefully some of it sticks.

Engineering animals is the hardest of all. In these cases, viral vectors are used when possible. Same concept, find a retrovirus that infects your species of choice, and replace the retrovirus DNA with your gene of interest. However, you can't just regenerate a human being or any other animal from some transformed cells (you can do this with plants), so you have to find a way to get engineered cells back into the body. Or you can start with stem cells. Either way, the success rate is remarkably low.

2007-02-12 09:42:41 · answer #1 · answered by floundering penguins 5 · 1 0

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