What will happen if foreign DNA is injected into human?

We see hollywood flicks where we find transgenic monster in all forms,can we do that in real life as well.Can we make that happen in a laboratory ?

Let;'s say we want to create a mystical beast hybrid of tiger and human.So basically we need the DNA of a tiger to embed the quality of tiger into human.So we take out the DNA of tiger and inject it to human,so what will happen next are we going to get the stripes of tiger ,or the bloody claws??

Fact is nothing will happen, if the injection is not pure the most spectacular thing may be an immune response, and the extreme case an anaphylactic shock (and death).

Free floating DNA molecules in the blood stream are common, if they are somehow delivered inside the cell they would either cause the cell to die or recognized as foreign DNA and removed. In the intercellular space or blood I suspect that macrophages (type of immune cell) will eat all the tiger DNA

If you injected naked DNA from any species, nothing would really happen. The DNA would get degraded by cells of the immune system. If you injected a viral vector that infects human cells, and the viral vector carried a specific tiger gene, then the effects would depend on the viral vector and the gene, as well as which cells were targeted by the virus and incorporated the tiger gene. Even in this "gene therapy" or gene transduction scenario, not much would happen, as gene transduction has not been very successful and is not very easy to do in general, especially in humans. We can make transgenic mice carrying human DNA as models of some human diseases but then again the effects are limited to the specific gene in question. The mouse is still a mouse. If we made transgenic mice with a tiger gene, they would still be mice, behave like mice, etc.

Read More

Unknown Wednesday, May 07, 2014  No comment

Could proteins be separated from DNA using agarose gel electrophoresis? Explain.

Agarose gel electrophoresis is a method of gel electrophoresis used in biochemistry, molecular biology, and clinical chemistry to separate a mixed population of DNA or proteins in a matrix of agarose. The proteins may be separated by charge and or size (IEF agarose, essentially size independent), and the DNA and RNA fragments by length. Biomolecules are separated by applying an electric field to move the negatively charged molecules through an agarose matrix, and the bio-molecules are separated by size in the agarose gel matrix.

It can be done it is based upon the use of an ionic detergent, SDS, to neutralize cationic sites of weakly bound proteins thereby resulting in their dissociation off the helix. Proteins tightly or covalently bound to DNA that are not dissociable by SDS, result in the precipitation of the DNA fragment by the addition of KCl; however, free nucleic acid does not precipitate. This method can be used as a general assay in the purification of as yet unidentified protein or other activities that bind DNA covalently.

Agarose gels do not have a uniform pore size, but are optimal for electrophoresis of proteins that are larger than 200 kd. Agarose gel electrophoresis can also be used for the separation of DNA fragments ranging from 50 base pair to several megabases (millions of bases), the largest of which require specialized apparatus. The distance between DNA bands of different lengths is influenced by the percent agarose in the gel, with higher percentages requiring longer run times, sometimes days.

You can use agarose gel but SDS page would be more reliable that SDS

Protein separation from DNA using SDS page SDS page.

Protein in SDS

SDS page elctrophoresis

Read More

Unknown Saturday, November 23, 2013