Working for a pharmaceutical company, you synthetically design a new bacteriosta

Question

Working for a pharmaceutical company, you synthetically design a new bacteriostatic agent that inhibits the activity of DNA helicase. What effect will this agent have on its target cells? Will it result in cell death?

Keeping in mind that prokaryotes have one chromosome and so only a single copy of their genes, if a mutation occurs in the Shine Dalgarno sequence of Gene A such that it no longer produces a recognizable sequence, what impact would this have on the ability of the organism to produce the protein product of Gene A? Be able to explain the outcome and why that outcome occurs.

In prokaryotes, the processes of DNA replication and transcription are independent of each other, and yet often are occurring simultaneously. Why are they not dependent on each other? Why do they often occur at the same time?

Explanation / Answer

Explanation:- Helicase enzyme is important one in the process of replication and transcription as it helps in seperation of double helix DNA at the origin of replication by breaking hydrogen bonds between bases by using energy from ATP hydrolysis. If bacteriostatic is added ut would interfere with functioning of helicase enzyme there by process of replication would not proceed. Therefore genetic material would not be copied exactly and would result in death of cell. Shine Dalgarno sequence also called ribosome binding site (RBS) “AGGAGG” that is present on mRNA 10-12 nucleotides upstream of start codon “AUG” if this sequence gets mutated in gene then mRNA will not bind properly with small subunit (30s) of ribosome (70s) hence translation process will be affected and protein cannot formed.Replication and transcription occur independently because they are carried by different enzymes and differnt stages of cell. Replication occurs during S phase of cell and gene expression in interphase.

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