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Identification of Unknown Plasmid

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I. Title Identification of an Unknown Plasmid In this experiment, we determined the phenotypic capability of an unknown plasmid along with its size. With the use of gel electrophoresis, we analyzed the gel photograph by using a standard DNA marker, Lambda HindIII, and came to a conclusion based on our results. II. Abstract Two experiments were done to identify an unknown plasmid. The success of these experiments came from the use of modern day technology involving gel electrophoresis. First, bacterial transformation to E. Coli DH5 was performed on our unknown plasmid along with two known plasmids, pAMP and pKAN, and a negative control TE, a buffer without DNA. By performing confluency streaking of bacteria in plates …show more content…

After viewing the photograph of our gel, we had enough data to begin concluding on whether our unknown plasmid was pAMP or pKAN. Plasmid maps of pAMP and pKAN were given, informing us the number of base pairs each fragment contained when cut with a particular enzyme. After viewing the fragments of the three samples, we compared the data to the standard, lambda DNA fragments. For the lambda fragments, the number of base pairs for each fragment was given. With this data we were able to make a prediction on our unknown plasmid by comparing the length of migration of the standard fragments to the uncut, single cut, and double cut samples. IV. Materials and Methods Our research on recombinant DNA mainly consisted of two experiments: Transformation and gel electrophoresis. In our first experiment, four microfuge tubes were given to us: pKAN DNA, pAMP DNA, unknown DNA, and a TE buffer without DNA. The two positive controls, pKAN and pAMP, consisted of an antibiotic resistance gene respectively to their name. The pKAN plasmid contained the gene resistance for kanamycin while pAMP carried the gene resistance for ampicillin. The negative control, TE, only contained buffer without DNA. The fourth tube was our unknown plasmid, which was either pKAN or pAMP; and by way of artificial transformation, we would be able to initiate the identification of our unknown plasmid. E. coli DH5 was the host on which we performed

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