Question

You are still a neurobiologist studying social cells in the brains of zebrafish. Your colleague points out that an inherited neurological disorder that affects social behavior is linked to a gene that controls ER assembly called ERGIC1. You decide to follow up on this by making a new transgenic animal that will express GFP in social cells, however this time the GFP will be restricted to the ER. This will allow you to monitor the structure of the ER in social cells, being especially interesting once you have identified a zebrafish with a mutation in the ergic1 gene.

How would you go about this? More specifically what DNA elements would you need and how would they have to be assembled to generate this transgenic animal? What would the linear structure of the encoded protein look like?

Answer 1

Answer- To determine the mutated zebrafish the sequencing of DNA will be performed and the sequence of the target gene will be compared with normal wildtype sequence. We will need primers and the DNA sequence the mutation if present can be determined by sequence analysis. The linear structure of the protein will look some different from the wildtype cells. And there will be malfunctioning ER in social cells.