Transformation and Protein Expression MIT 7.01SC Fundamentals of Biology
PROFESSOR: Welcome to another help session on recombinant DNA. Today, we're going to be discussing about transformation and protein expression. As you can imagine, there are often many times we will need a large amount of protein. But it can be difficult to get it from the original source. For example, you need insulin to treat diabetes, but it's not exactly practical to get a lot of insulin from humans. In order to get a lot of the desired protein, often other organisms will be used to express this protein. But it's a multi-step process. For example, let's say we want to express our human insulin in bacteria. Well, the human gene has both introns and exons, as you remember from lecture. Exons are what are actually cut together in order to produce the final mature mRNA, which is later used to express the protein. Bacteria, on the other hand, don't have introns. They just have exons. So they are only capable of reading a gene that just has the exons and...