Why is it difficult to get bacteria to express genes directly from eukaryotic DNA?

A. Eukaryotic genes contain introns.
B. Eukaryotic genes do not contain operons.
C. Eukaryotic genes are transcribed into a single mRNA.
D. Eukaryotic genes contain exons.
E. Eukaryotic genes may contain oncogenes.

A. Introns are non-coding DNA, and bacteria don’t have mechanisms to splice (separate) the exons (coding DNA) from the introns.

November 21 2008 04:54 pm | Genes

2 Responses to “Why is it difficult to get bacteria to express genes directly from eukaryotic DNA?”

  1. oedipalpanties on 21 Nov 2008 at 10:28 pm #

    A. Introns are non-coding DNA, and bacteria don’t have mechanisms to splice (separate) the exons (coding DNA) from the introns.
    References :
    Biology Major at AU

  2. andymanec on 21 Nov 2008 at 11:04 pm #

    It’s A.

    Since bacteria don’t have the molecular machinery to splice out introns, you’d be left with either an overly-long protein with unnecessary (or detrimental) sequences, or a truncated protein (if the intron contained a stop codon).

    To get it to work, you have to be tricky. You need to isolate the RNA of the gene you want (with the introns already spliced out), then use Reverse Transcriptase to work backwards and generate intron-free cDNA for the gene in question. That way, you let the eukaryotic cell do the splicing.
    References :

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