Question

A scientist injected a gene into a bacterial cell, expecting it to synthesize functional protein product of that gene. But rather the protein product was nonfunctional and contained more amino acids than the human gene created in a eukaryotic cells. Why did this happen, please explain as much as you can. Thank you

Answer 1

Ans: As we know that bacterial cells are the example of prokaryotic cells and these cells differs from the eukaryotic cells. Eukaryotic genome contains the non-coding regions called introns which are choped off after the mRNA processing and the resultant exons are utilized for the protein synthesis and that's why eukaryotes possess the machinery for this introns splicing process but this is not the case in bacterial cells. Bacterial cell's genome do not contain any introns and that's why the intron splicing machinery is absent in bacterial cells. So the gene that is injected in the bacterial cell also contains the introns which are not spliced from the mRNA and that's why these intron sequence will too participate in the translation process and sequence of the introns also serves as codons for amino acids. So because of the increased mRNA sequence the product of this gene obtained from bacterial cell contains more amino acids then the protein created in eukaryotic cell and because of this increased number of amino acids the protein will be nom-functional.