What
do we think when we hear “genetic engineering”? I was used to think in
fluorescent animals, giant vegetables and the Ninja Turtles (I haven’t lost
hope). But I was pretty surprised when I discover the real meaning.
As
a definition, genetic engineering is the modification/manipulation of an
organism genome using different molecular techniques. From that definition, we
should go further and think what it really means. We may travel to the 1970’s
to see that the first organisms genetically modified were viruses and bacteria.
The main aim of these projects, after the great discoveries about the existence
and the structure of the DNA, was to know if this DNA was modifiable and if
life could survive to these
modifications. The process is theoretically simple: we take or create a DNA
sequence that we know encodes for a particular gene or group of genes, and we
introduce this sequence inside the host cell.
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| Dolly the sheep. The process of cloning. Picture from www.glogster.com |
