Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi all, I'm working on a biotech project, and ours is based around this: A gene found in a virus that creates a heat-resistant "shield" around the virus's vulnerable dna. Our project is how we could isolate this shield-making gene, and insert it into a bacteria, making that bacteria resistant to heat through the use of that shield gene. What I would like to know is, is this sort of thing possible, or in practice at all?

Hi,

This sounds very interesting! Isolating this viral DNA and placing it into bacteria is transduction. This is definitely possible, but may be a little complicated as transductions are not always successful. Perhaps you could research various types of heat resistant viruses and try to transduct bacteria with the different types of viruses. However, many bacteria have genes conferring for thermal resistance, so maybe an experiment using bacterial amplification and transformation would be more applicable. In this kind of experiment, you could isolate the bacterial heat resistance gene, use PCR to amplify it (copy the genes many times), then use heat shock to transform the bacteria with this gene. Examples of bacterial genes that confer thermal resistance have been found to be evgA and yde0 in E-coli. Here is an experiment regarding the engineering of Ecoli to become heat resistant: https://academic.oup.com/peds/article/2 ... istance-by

Let me know if you have any more questions!
~Catherine M