Biotechnology: Basics of gene cloning and gene therapy

One of the reasons why biotechnology has received so much attention during the past three decades is because of gene cloning. Although many useful products can be obtained from microbial culture, the list in the past has been limited to those compounds naturally synthesized by microorganisms. Many important pharmaceuticals, which are produced not by microbes but by higher organisms, could not be obtained in this way.

This has been changed by the application of gene cloning to biotechnology. Gene cloning involves separating a specific gene or DNA segment from a larger chromosome, attaching it to a small molecule of carrier DNA, and then replicating this modified DNA thousands or millions of times through both an increase in host cell number and the creation of multiple copies of the cloned DNA in each cell. Particularly important to gene cloning is a set of enzymes made available through decades of research on nucleic acid metabolism.

Two classes of enzymes lie at the heart of the classic approach to generating and propagating a recombinant DNA molecules i. e. , Restriction nucleases and DNA ligase.

Restriction endonucleases (also called restriction enzymes) recognize and cleave DNA at specific sequences (recognition sequences or restriction sites) to generate a set of smaller fragments. Some restriction endonucleases make staggered cuts on the two DNA strands, leaving two to four nucleotides of one strand unpaired at each resulting end. These unpaired strands are referred to as sticky ends.