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Asked by imnotascientistsohelpmeouthere to Kerstin on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: Theories.
Question: Why do we want to know how transcription is stopped after a full gene is copied to RNA? How could this relate to everyday life? Or whatever else it relates to?
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Kerstin Zechner answered on 16 Mar 2010:
Hey! Great nickname by the way 🙂
If transcription isn’t halted, all the genes found on one of your chromosomes would be copied to RNA and then expressed into a protein. As you don’t require all genes to be expressed into proteins at the same time, this would basically “overload” the cell with proteins and cause it to eventually die. So if transcription wasn’t stopped in your cells, you wouldn’t be alive!
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Comments
imnotascientistsohelpmeouthere commented on :
Do people/living organisms die from this? If we understood transcription could we create completely new DNA?
thank you for answering my question 😀
Kerstin commented on :
No, organisms can’t die from it. At the end of each gene there is a signal that is recognised by the protein responsible for transcribing the DNA into RNA and causes transcription to stop. The chances that all these signals in all genes don’t work is very, very low.
The reason we study how transcription stops is because we want to understand the overall process of how you get from a gene to a protein. With a better understanding in this, other labs can use our data and apply it to medical research.
Completely new DNA has already been made 🙂 You can make it in two ways. Some people actually use synthetic building blocks of DNA to make new DNA sequences. A guy called Craig Venter has actually recently created a synthetic, man-made genome (which is the collection of all genes of an organims) for a bacterium. Some people don’t agree with it, because they think it’s man messing with nature. What do you think? 🙂
Another way to make new DNA is take different bits of DNA and fuse them together. You can even take bits of bacterial DNA, for example, and fuse it worm or human DNA.
daviessem commented on :
Like Lego?
Kerstin commented on :
Yeah, more or less 🙂
veatrix commented on :
Well people don’t agree with creating a man-made genome because man is messing with nature. Wouldn’t it be better if we just left it alone? We seemed to have lived fine these past few years, and we don’t exactly know what the long-term effects could be. Isn’t the risk too high? Since I don’t know much about this field of work I would like to hear your opinion on this.
Kerstin commented on :
I think in the case of Craig Venter and the artificial bacterial genome, there isn’t really a direct danger. All this research takes place in a very contained environment to ensure that the bacteria can’t be released. Sometimes I think that people are going a bit far with this kind of research, but it might be able to solve problems we might have in the future. For example if we can easily create our own food this way, this might ease hunger in the third world.
imnotascientistsohelpmeouthere commented on :
in theory could we grow organs using this process?
daviessem commented on :
Could you accidentally make a mistake and make a DNA that make the animal produce loads of toxin for instance, or mutate or something?
Kerstin commented on :
I think stem cell research is the main way people are looking at how to grow organs.
I think if you made a mistake in the DNA sequence the most likely things that would happen would be that it either wouldn’t affect the organism at all (as a lot of DNA doesn’t code for genes), or that the organism would die in the embryo stage.