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     This chapter discusses....GENETIC TECHNOLOGY! First, let's start off with the basics. What is gene cloning? Gene cloning is the process of making multiple copies of a certain gene of interest. What is genomics? Genomics is the molecular analysis of the entire genome of a species. Another two topics that will be discussed in this chapter are biotechnology and genetic engineering. Biotechnology is the use of living organisms or the products of living organisms for human benefit while genetic engineering is the direct capability to manipulate genes for practical (...not always) purposes.

     Getting back to gene cloning... Gene cloning has provided the foundation for critical technical advances in a variety of different studies. These include genetics, biochemistry and even medicine. The two main goals of gene cloning is to produce large amounts of DNA of a specific gene and expressing the cloned gene so that it produces the encoded protein. In an attempt to achieve these two goals, scientists follow a few simple steps.

1. Isolate the vector DNA from the bacterial cell and isolate the gene of interest from the chromosomal DNA.
2. Insert the gene of interest into the vector.
3. Introduce a recombinant vector into a host cell that doesn't already have a vector. This allows the host cell to copy the vector a number of times and divide in order to produce many cells.

     As we were discussing before, genomics is the study of the genome of a certain species. However, functional genomics is the study of the expression of those genes. Cloning an entired genome is much easier when a cloning vector accepts large chromosomal DNA inserts. If a plasmid or viral vector has a DNA insert that's too large, DNA replication is quite difficult. BAC (Bacterial artificial chromosome) is a type of cloning that contains much larger inserted DNA fragments. Another method, the Dideoxy Chain-Termination Method is used to determine the base sequences of DNA (DNA sequencing). By doing this, scientists learn a lot more about the function of the gene.

               Proteins, such as insulin, are important to certain diseases, such as diabetes. Insulin is created by inserting the alpha and beta chains next to the coding sequence of E. Coli. By doing this, E. Coli is able to replicate. A topic that sort of branches of this topic is molecular pharming. Molecular pharming is the research that is involved in producing proteins (such as what we discussed before) in agricultural crops or even animals. These genetically modified organisms are also known as transgenic organisms (undergo gene addition or gene replacement). However, transgenic organisms are different from organisms that undergo gene knockouts. Gene knockout is when an organism undergoes a mutation that makes a certain gene nonfunctional

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