The Protein Man's Blog | A Discussion of Protein Research

Genome editing used to be a long, laborious, and expensive process that, for quite a long time, you’d have been forgiven for thinking only worked on mice. In the earlier days, making a single genomic modification on a target organism could take a year or so and may have cost up to several hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete. Thankfully, these limitations were addressed with the development of powerful alternative bioengineering technologies, namely ZFN, TALENs, and CRISPR.

With more than one million cases in 208 countries and territories around the world, the scientific and medical communities are on a race against time to find a viable prevention and treatment plan for the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its associated disease, COVID-19, which has already claimed tens of thousands of lives to date. This challenge has led them to focus on how the virus breaks into human cells.

How Does the Coronavirus Infect Target Cells?

Plasmid isolation is crucial to biology and an essential step in various procedures, including cloning, DNA sequencing, transfection, in vitro translation, blotting, and gene therapy. However, these applications require the isolation of high-purity plasmid DNA. Whereas genomic DNA extraction is simple and straightforward, plasmid DNA extraction can be more complicated.

A DNA Polymerase is a vital biological enzyme that is present in DNA replication. In the process, DNA copies into two daughter DNA molecules and synthesizes a new DNA strand from the existing strand by adding dNTPs to the growing DNA.