- How did knowing insulin's precise 3D architecture lead to engineered analogue insulins?
Genetic Engineering and Recombinant DNA
Techniques for directly modifying organisms' genomes.
- What do restriction enzymes do in bacteria naturally, before Berg's lab repurposed them as a tool?
- How did Paul Berg's lab combine restriction enzymes and ligase to construct the first recombinant DNA molecule?
- What did Boyer and Cohen demonstrate in 1973 by inserting a foreign gene into E. coli?
- What role do restriction enzymes and DNA ligase play in splicing genes from two different plasmids?
- How did Boyer and Cohen prove that the recombinant plasmid was faithfully copied by E. coli's descendants?
- What industry grew out of the 1973 Boyer-Cohen experiment, and what was its first major medical product?
- How were diabetics treated with insulin before recombinant bacterial production became possible?
- How did a cold call from Robert Swanson to Herbert Boyer in 1976 lead to the founding of Genentech?
- What earlier discovery by Boyer and Stanley Cohen made a company like Genentech possible?
- Why was Genentech's production of somatostatin in bacteria such an important proof of concept?
- How did Genentech's early work lead to the production of human insulin and growth hormone soon after?
- Why do bacteria have enzymes that cut up viral DNA at specific sites in the first place?
- What was the difference between Werner Arber's theoretical prediction and Hamilton Smith's isolation of an actual restriction enzyme?
- How did Daniel Nathans use restriction enzymes to build the first genetic map of a DNA molecule?
- How did the discovery of restriction enzymes lead directly to recombinant DNA technology?
- What did Paul Berg demonstrate about cutting and rejoining DNA from different organisms, and why was that considered opening a door?
- What are introns, and why must they be removed from messenger RNA before it can be used?
- What did Michael Smith's site-directed mutagenesis technique let researchers do to a gene?
- Why are standard commercial tomatoes harvested green and then gassed with ethylene?
- How did inserting an antisense gene targeting polygalacturonase slow the Flavr Savr tomato's softening?
- Why did the Flavr Savr fail commercially despite being the first genetically modified whole food approved by the FDA?
- Why do mutations in signal sequences underlie certain inherited diseases?
- How did Capecchi and Smithies use the cell's own homologous recombination machinery to knock out a specific gene?
- What role did Martin Evans's embryonic stem cell lines play in creating knockout mice?
- Why did the Nobel committee award the same trio for the same discovery six years after the Lasker?
- What is homologous recombination and how did Capecchi and Smithies use it to alter genes?
- What did Martin Evans discover about culturing mouse embryonic stem cells?
- How does a knockout mouse let researchers determine what a single gene does?
- What does the CFTR gene normally do, and how does the F508del mutation disrupt it?
- How do the three molecules in elexacaftor–tezacaftor–ivacaftor each address a different step of the CFTR defect?
- What fraction of cystic fibrosis patients benefited from this triple combination therapy?