• Question: Could you make plant genes from the 4 different things. (Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine.)

    Asked by to Amelia, Izzy, Sarah on 18 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sarah Harvey

      Sarah Harvey answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      Good question and the short answer is yes, although it’s expensive!

      If you want to clone a plant gene it’s cheap and (relatively) simple to amplify it from the plant’s DNA or RNA. However some things can be tricky to clone and you can send off to various companies which can synthesise the genes for you out of a pool of Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine which are the four bases which make up plant DNA as well as human/animal DNA.

    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      If we already knew the exact DNA sequence of the gene, we could spend money getting it made from scratch, as Sarah says.

      However, something we cannot do yet is design brand new genes from scratch. We just don’t understand the systems in biology well enough yet. We could make a prediction and use a computer to test our prediction, but biology often doesn’t work as we predicted. Although the plant might read your ATCGs and make the correct amino acid sequence, it might not be able to make the protein we desire. Amino acids fold up into proteins in a complicated way, with lots of extra bonds and new features added on. Our knowledge of these systems is not good enough yet to be able to know how this would work with a made up gene.

      This is why GM technology only uses existing genes from other plants, rather than scientists guessing and making things work. It would be a huge waste of money! And time!

    • Photo: Amelia Frizell-Armitage

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine are the 4 units that make up DNA (as you probably know). These 4 units are repeated over and over again to make a long DNA molecule. The order of the units determines what genes you have.

      Theoretically if we knew the order of all the DNA in a plant then we could create the right genes by making the same order of units in a petri dish. This is actually done already and is called Artifical gene synthesis, although people use it to make small genes like yeast genes.

      I think that one day it will be possible to completely make your own plant this way yes. However, it would be really expensive and take up a lot of time. Genetically Modifying an already existing plant would be a better method, and you could still get a plant with the exact combination of genes that you want 😀

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