Question: what experiment are you working on right now

Maria Magdalena Razalan answered on 15 Nov 2015:

I am now producing proteins from plants using bacteria!

-how do I do this: I take specific DNA codes (every living thing, including us, is made out of a specific looooong DNA code, where only 4 letters alternate and repeat over and over again, G-A-T-C) from my plants and I introduce them in bacteria (that have their own DNA and are capable of producing things from external DNA too).

-how do i choose the codes: many scientists before me have been able to collect many DNA codes from different living organisms using very powerful reading machines. Everyone can find these codes on the NCBI (National Centre for Biotechnology Information) database. I select mine using references from the papers I read that are relevant for my research.

-why do I have to use bacteria to produce proteins: plant already produce the proteins I am interested in, the problem is that they either produce them in very very tiny amounts (not enough for my experiments) or in very specific moments of the life of the plant (this means I would have to grow the plants and wait, wait, wait). Bacteria (in my case I use Escherichia coli) instead are very easy systems, with short lives and are able to produce many many things if you provide them the DNA information needed.

So, if you compare yourself to an architect and the DNA to a blueprint of a building, the bacteria are the engineers and workers who will make up the building!

-why do I do this: I want to understand what some proteins do inside the plants, and to do so I have to produce lots of them and make experiments!