I have not had much personal experience in genetics throughout my educational career, but from what I understand, cloning involves the generation/production of genetically identical organisms. Bacterial vectors are especially useful for this because of their relatively easy to manipulate genomes and their fast reproduction rate. In the field of bacterial genetics, cloning is often used to study the effects of certain mutations on the function of an organism. This can be done by introducing mutations at certain sites in the genome (like what we are doing for our CRISPR experiment) to produce a certain phenotype or examine that mutation to see what functions it affects in comparison to the wild-type species. In the research lab I am currently working in, I conducted a transformation using Streptococcus pneumoniae, doing a gene knockout to replace a gene encoding a protease with an antibiotic resistance gene. After proceeding with the transformation, I isolated the new bacterial mutant and made stocks of it, which I am using for the current experiments I am running to see how the mutant adheres to epithelial cells in the absence of that protease. Previous to this experiment, I have had very little exposure to genetics, and MB310/311 is the first time I am really being introduced to genetics in the context of bacterial molecular genetics.
