Lecture 6 Flashcards
How does bacteria reproduce ?
- Asexual reproduction via cell division
What is the main mechanism of gaining generic variation in bacteria
- horizontal gene transfer
Vertical gene inheritance in bacteria
What is horizontal gene transfer in bacteria?
- when an organism acquires genes directly from another cell and incorporates them into its genome
- responsible for the spread of fitness enhancing traits, including antibiotic resistance
- provides a mechanism for ongoing adaptive evolution
3 types of horizontal gene transfer
- conjunction
- transduction
- transformation
What is conjunction
- mating
- DNA transfer through cell-to cell contact mediated by a mobile genetic element such as a plasmid
what is transduction
- DNA transfer mediated by a bacteriophage
What is transformation
Uptake of naked DNA into a competent recipient cell
Two different ways conjunction can happen
Diagram on conjunction, transformation and transduction
DNA transfer is _______, from a ____ to ______ cell
Unidirectional
Donor
Recipient
Only _____ of the donor _____ is transferred to the receipt end in genetic exchange
Part
Genome
(Need recombination to insert it?)
What kind of DNA is usually transferred? Can this replicate by itself? What happens to the transferred DNA?
- in most cases the transferred DNA consists of linear fragments that cannot be replicated autonomously
- consequently, for transferred genes to be stably inherited by recipient cells, they must be recombined into the recipient chromosome
- recipient is permanently changed
Why was Escherichia coli the work horse of molecular biology / why was it chosen for study in 1940?
- it is non-pathogenic, rapid growth, simple nutritional requirements
- supports the growth of a range of bacterial viruses - chosen by a group of physicists and biologists (the “phage group”) to study the problem of replication
- carry out genetic crosses, analyse genetic properties
What bacterium was the first that sexual recombination was discovered in?
E.coli
What experiment did Joshua lederberg do? How do you detect genetic change? Why did it not be too slay what dod he do instead ?
- wanted to find out if bacteria recombined their DNA
- Took autotrophic bacteria and crossed them together
- the sensitivity was dependednt on the frequency of reversion - this didn’t show much in terms of usual revertnants vs recombinants.
- need to use doubly marked strains (freq decreased - double reversion - 10-6 X 10-6 = 10-12
- very powerful selection method to detect genetic recombination
I don’t understand this slide
What is an autotroph
- needs nutritional requirements
What is a prototroph
Don’t not need additional factors
Lederburg and tatums experiment
- mixed autographs together and got prototropic colonies which told him there was recombination happening between A- and B-
Why was lederbergs “simple approach” considered so brilliant ?
- It represented the first use of conditional mutants to select against the parental type
- The mutants were double mutants so revelation artefacts were avoided
- The prototrphic recovery technique has enormous sensitivity
- double mutants meant revertants couldn’t happen!!!!