Page 64 - Cell biology PDG 2024

cell membrane through which the recombinant may enter. After the
electric shock, the holes are rapidly closed by the cell's membrane-repair
mechanisms.

3) Nanoparticles: Silver nanoparticles increase the porosity of the cell
membrane allowing the entry of the recombinant DNA.

Transduction

Transduction is the process of using a virus (lentivirus or adenovirus)
to enter the DNA or plasmids into a cell.
This technique depends on the ability of viruses to inject their DNA
into the infected host. Scientists can modify the viral DNA to contain
the DNA sequences of interest.

This method can be more difficult because the virus must be grown,
modified to be non-infectious and the DNA of interest must be packaged
into the viral particle before infection of new host cells

Applications of genetic engineering
 Medicine: include the manufacturing of drugs and gene therapy.

 Research: Genetically modified animals and organisms to discover
the functions of certain genes

 Agriculture: Plants have been modified for insect protection,
herbicide and virus resistance.

 Industry: transforming microorganisms such as bacteria or yeast
with a gene coding for a useful protein. Many numbers of proteins
can be produced by growing the transformed organism in
bioreactors, then purifying the protein.

Gene therapy

It is the insertion of a normal gene into a genome of someone
suffering from genetic disease in order to repair the mutation that
causes this disease .

When a normal gene is inserted into the nucleus of a mutant cell,
two things may happen either the repair of mutation or a new
mutation may occur if the normal gene integrates itself in a wrong
position in the genome ( in a functional gene).

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