Bacterial Transformation Flashcards
How can you ‘heat-shock’ bacteria?
By incubating the bacteria at a high temperature and then immediately placing it on ice
Heat-shocking bacteria induces the formation of what in bacterial membranes?
Pores
Bacterial pores allow what substance to enter the cell for transformation?
Supercoiled plasmid DNA
What is CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)?
A form of accurate and efficient gene editing
The CRISPR-Cas system evolved initially in microbes, for what kind of mechanism?
A defence mechanism
What protein forms a complex with a guide RNA in a cell during CRISPR?
The Cas9 protein
What are plasmids?
Structures within bacterial cells that carry genetic information separate from the circular DNA - it may also carry different genes
What structure in a bacterial cells contains a higher number of genes - the circular DNA or a plasmid?
The circular DNA
How do bacteria reproduce?
By binary fission
Why is bacterial transformation beneficial for bacteria?
It increases the genetic diversity, and allows the bacteria to adapt and evolve
What is DNA recombination?
DNA is broken down into fragments, and then recombined in a different combination to the first DNA molecule, allowing different alleles to express alternative phenotypes
What is DNA ligation?
Two or more DNA strands are combined by DNA ligase to form a single DNA molecule
A plasmid must contain what to be stably maintained within bacterial cells?
An origin of replication
What is vertical gene transfer?
Genes are transferred from the parent cell to the daughter cell during cell division
What is horizontal gene transfer?
Gene transfer occurs between two different cells, outside of a family tree
