(Photo credits: Wonderfest.org) I'm sure most of you have seen a Jurassic Park movie, or at least know the plot of it; collecting dinosaur DNA from fossils and editing the code into the DNA of existing animals to lay dinosaur eggs and use this to form a giant prehistoric amusement park! Sounds amazing doesn't it? Well unfortunately it's not as simple as that.
Well to simply put it, unfortunately it is impossible to revive dinosaurs because first, DNA has a half-life of 521 years and that's way before biology was even a thing people knew about. Second of all, even if we had dino DNA, it is impossible to put a whole genome into another animal's genome and have a dinosaur offspring be born. Yet, Jurassic Park was a movie that did inspire genetic modification which is now widely used in research now. So how exactly does it work? Now note that there are many ethical debates about how ethical it is to edit an organism and play god but today we are only going to discuss how it is done. Well first we need the locus(specific location of a gene) that we want, and we need to ''cut'' this gene out. To do this we need restriction enzymes that are specific to this locus. With the work of restriction enzymes, we have the isolated gene(s) we want. Next we need a medium to put the genes in. Most of the time genes are put into bacteria to makes certain proteins we want such as insulin for diabetics. But since we are looking at how to edit an organism, we need to edit or replace the genes in a genome of the organism. So first we require special nucleases, enzymes that break up nucleotides. This will allow us to cut up any area we want in the DNA. Now we need to put the genes we want in the cut we made. Using DNA ligase, an enzymes that acts like glue, we can stick the genes we want into the organism's genome. Now note the genes we have taken are single stranded while the DNA is double stranded. So to complete the sequence, we need to use reverse transcriptase, an enzyme that works like a copy machine, this allows us to finish up the DNA sequence to make complementary DNA. Now the sequence editing is complete. It is a long confusing process but if you want to know how to do genetic engineering, this is the basics of it!
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