Today's Topic: SRK. (For those who don't know, SRK stands for Sanchita Rahnuma Khan.)
Yesterday she was taking class on
Horizontal Gene transfer between bacterial species, especially
Transduction. As an intro she mentioned Zinder & Lederberg experiment. She told, in the experiment observed frequency of gene transfer between two
auxotrophs were
10-5. Anyway, she continued with her lecture. In the class I came to know following facts:
Firstly, the frequency of DNA transfer from bacterial genome to phage genome is 1-2 %.
Secondly, the frequency of DNA transfer from phage to another bacteria is 1-2%.
Taking these facts together, my calculation was the frequency of gene transfer would be 10
-4. The 10X anomaly can be explained if we consider the fact that each DNA transfer might not result in complete Gene transfer. But she gave another brand new data!!! She said, the frequency of gene transfer by transduction is around
10-6. This was completely unexpected. I was wondering to solve the mystery of
10-4 and
10-5, instead a new data of 10
-6 came up. I was completely puzzled and brought the facts into her notice. To be honest, I asked her out of curiosity, I didn't mean to harass her. (If you are a teacher, I think you would prefer not to have me in your class ;). Cause I can create lots of troubles when I want to, and sometimes I do.) Felt sorry looking at her face and I myself tried to cover up things by answering from my instincts. Anyway, she told us to check things out.
I've downloaded
Zinder & Lederberg's paper, read couple of pages. The paper is kind of clumsy, but I think I'll be able to figure it out...
2 comments:
hmm,you shouldn't have harassed her!...:P
I didn't!
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