Chapter 14 - Introduction

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To fully appreciate this tutorial, you should be familiar with the concepts of:

• DNA structure
• Complementary base pairing
• Protein synthesis

• Transcription
• Translation

After this tutorial, you will be able to describe:
• How a restriction enzyme cuts DNA at specific sites
• The steps in construction of a plasmid that can be used to mass-produce a protein of interest
• The process by which recombinant clones are identified

How can we make bacteria produce human proteins?

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Restriction enzymes
Plasmids
Foreign DNA properties
Joining foreign DNA and plasmid
Expression and screening
Summary

A few decades ago, insulin, a protein that is critical to the management of diabetes, was expensive and hard to find, and often didn't work. Now it is cheaply produced, of high quality, and found in nearly every corner drugstore. How did this happen? Recombinant DNA technology made it possible. When insulin was first in use, it had to be purified from animal pancreases. The process was not only expensive and complicated, but patients often rejected the animal insulin, making it useless in treating their diabetes. By inserting the gene for human insulin into a bacterial cell, we now are able to mass-produce a safe, cheap, better-tolerated alternative to animal insulin for the treatment of diabetes.