Posts tagged Cloning
Oh Yeah, Developmental Biology!
Dinosaur Bones: What ancient proteins can tell us about dinosaurs
Remember in Jurassic Park when they got dinosaur DNA from an ancient mosquito’s stomach? Well, if they had been interested in dinosaur proteins, they only had to look at a dinosaur bone.
Dinosaur bones are at least 65 million years old. And all of the meat has turned to stone. Over this amount of time and with this much abuse, scientists thought no DNA or proteins could survive. They were wrong.
Recently, scientists were able to pull proteins out of a T. rex bone. Now they have done some additional work that suggests dinosaurs are closely related to birds. It is amazing that our technology has become so sensitive that we can examine dinosaur proteins.
Is cloning an organism the same as cloning a gene?
You’ve heard about cloning animals - sheep, mice, even house pets - in the news. From time to time, you may have also heard about researchers cloning, or identifying, genes that are responsible for various medical conditions or traits.
What is the difference?
Cloning an animal, or any other organism, refers to making an exact genetic copy of that organism. The techniques used to clone organisms are described on this page.
Cloning a gene means isolating an exact copy of a single gene from the entire genome of an organism. Usually this involves copying the DNA sequence of that gene into a smaller, more accessible piece of DNA, such as a plasmid. This makes it easier to study the function of the individual gene in the laboratory.
