CH 461 Lecture Notes - Lecture 36: Nucleic Acid Hybridization, Molecular Cloning, Base Pair
Document Summary
Whether you call the field of study biotechnology, genetic engineering, or dna technology, the goal of dna based genetics is to analyze and manipulate dna on the basis of its information content. In other words, this field studies the sequence of the individual nucleotides in a particular molecule. This task can be difficult, because one molecule of dna looks much like any other, which implies that genes can"t be separated by ordinary chemical methods. The dna of bakers" yeast looks much like the dna of the organism that produces penicillin, yet the organisms whose properties the dna encodes are very different. Chemically, dna maintains a very regular structure; differences in base composition are less important than sequence differences in determining the information content of dna. For example, if one were to make a tetranucleotide (a dna four units long) from one molecule each of a, g, c and t, 4! (4 .
