BIOL 103 Home

Pandora 5 Toruk

NAME ______________________   EXAM TIME Dec 20: _____ 8:30AM    _____6:30PM

This assignment needs to be your own work entirely. The MSSC cannot help you directly with this assignment, but you can get help with Practice Molecular Biology  and with More DNA Practice.


1.  Suppose Bigfoot trackers in Siberia discover a blue-furred monster whose genome is about as large as ours, but differs from ours by 3 million base pairs. 

(A) Suppose most of the 3 million differences in sequence are in the introns, not the exons. Why would this occur, based on how animals evolve?

(B) Do you think this Bigfoot is human? On what basis do you decide?

2. You are a doctor treating a patient with a sudden pneumonia; a related patient has already died in 48 hours. From the infecting bacteria, you obtain the following DNA sequence:

aagttttcgg agcatttttt tgaactttta aacgttcagc atggtccgta gaatgcatta
acctaaaggc ttctgcaaaa aattccgctt catttgttct cccatacgaa gttaaattac
tcccttcttc cttaaaaata tcaatgaatt ttttagaatt tgtaactaaa tcagattggt

Use the appropriate program to determine:

(A) What kind of bacteria caused the illness.

(B) What kind of protein the gene encodes.

(C) Show the protein (amino-acid) sequence of the gene.

3. Use a program to make a map of restriction enzyme cut sites in the DNA from question 2. 

(A) Show the restriction enzyme map of all the enzyme cut sites in your sequence.

(B) Show the recognition sequence of ONE of the enzymes that cuts your DNA sequence.

4. How can you use PCR to make many copies of the DNA from question 2? 

(A) Explain.

(B) Write a pair of two primer sequences that could be used to amplify the complete gene. 

5. Why is it easier to clone a bacterial species than to clone a dinosaur? 

Explain two different reasons.