A letter from March 25th, 2019

Dear FutureMe, so a bacteria can take in bits of dna called plasmids in its environment if it gets stressed out to the point where it thinks it's gonna die. it does this to grab any last chance at life possible. we made e. coli glow w dna from a jellyfish. the operons can be controlled by regulatory proteins and coactivators/repressor molecules. inducible positive means the regulatory protein activates the operon by attaching to the promoter. inducible negative means the repressor protein turns off the promoter by blocking the promoter. repressible positive means the regulatory protein makes the operon turn on by unblocking the promoter. repressible negative means the operon is turned off by the activator coming off the promoter. there are two types of transcription factors: general and specific. specific transcription factors affect the frequency of transcription a certain gene. specific factors bind to enhancers, while general factors bind to the actual promoter. activators on the enhancers can be connected to the promoter bc the dna can fold in on itself. gel electrophoresis is a way to tell a "dna fingerprint". restriction enzymes cut up the dna is specific places along a strand, so there are certain fragments left over. the combination of enzymes depends on the dna. so you load the stained DNA in a gel thing and then fill it with tbe buffer so it conducts an electric charge. the dna will move downwards bc opposites attract. small pieces move faster, large ones move slower. the stained dna has this thing called ethidium bromide attached to it. in the gel electrophoresis box, you can turn on a blue light to see your dna. the blue light excites the ethidium bromide and makes it visible to our eye. the orange cover on the box filters out the excitation wavelengths so we can only see the glowwwwww. you have a ladder on one side so you know exactly which one(s) match up correctly w your known sample. and that's the tea