At your biotech company, you have successfully isolated a psychrophilic microbe

Question

At your biotech company, you have successfully isolated a psychrophilic microbe that can ferment and utilize lactose as a sole carbon source on minimal medium (but can utilize other carbon sources as well), and you have confirmed lactase activity in this microbe.

You next want to find what gene or genes might be lactases responsible for this activity, so that you can potentially use them to produce large amounts of the lactase for inclusion in the product your company is developing.

Describe an approach that you might employ to identify genes responsible for lactase activity in this microbe.

What are some potential advantages and disadvantages of the approach that you chose?

Explanation / Answer

Note that this answer is related to finding the gene (in this case, lactase) inside the genome of the bacteria. There are several approaches which can be used to find the gene (for lactase) in computational biology. One of these is to look for Pribnow box in the genome. After finding out the promoter part for lactase gene, you can extract the gene and use PCR for developing large amount of lactase coding DNA.

Disadvantage: This would be a tedious and costly process, because large number of Pribnow boxes for several genes present in this microbe could be isolated. You have to check all the gene products for lactase activity to find out the exact lactase gene.

Advantage: This is ‘ab initio’ or intrinsic method finding gene. It is highly specific method, and chances of doubt are less.

Note that you could have used the extrinsic method also for finding the gene but obtaining the extrinsic evidence for a gene is further tedious and costly. This is generally employed in eukaryotes, where genome is much larger.

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