You are being hired to study protein turnover in Drosophila melanogaster. As par

Question

You are being hired to study protein turnover in Drosophila melanogaster. As part of this job, your boss has given you a specialized nutrition formulation containing a fixed amount of isotopically labeled ("heavy") water. The idea is that this "heavy" water would eventually get metabolized and reprocessed within the Drosophila to produce a heavy intact protein, which is what you are interested in. system to study protein turn over? List 2 other biological systems that may be easier (albeit less informative to humans) to study protein turnover and describe what makes them "easier" than Drosophila (b) Briefly (3-4 bullet comments) describe how you would isolate and purify this intact heavy protein. What analytical technique would you use to identify that you have indeed isolated the protein of interest. Explain your answer

Explanation / Answer

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Answer a) Drosophila melanogaster is a dipteran type of fly, commonly called as fruit fly. This organisms is used as a widely utilized eukaryotic non-vertebrate system to conduct in vitro and in vivo research methodologies. Owing to its small genome, easy rearing and handling along with short life-cycle and easy visibilty of phenotype, it is used as a model organism for genetics experimentations.

Other biological system which are easier than this system for studying protein turnover studies are:

Answer b) After the labelled water has been supplemented to the flies, they will metabolize it and protein will by synthesized post translation. These flies can be euthanized and a whole-body lysate can be formed using protease inhibitor cocktails. The protein can be subjected to serial purification and enrichment using membrane dialysis and column chromatography. This protein extract can be diluted and directly subjected to autoradiography for analyzing the scintillation count as a direct quantitative representation of the amount of protein synthesized in the flies.

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