Bacterial cloning is something that I’ve heard of in a few different classes before, but it has been treated with the attitude of “you’ll learn that later”, so I don’t really know much about it. Cloning using bacterial vectors is a great way to conduct science though, because bacteria reproduce asexually, rapidly, and there really aren’t too many ethical issues with cloning and killing bacteria compared to other species. Bacterial cloning can be really effective when doing reverse genetics, since you can have millions of clones with the exact same mutation to observe changes. Bacteria are also very useful in cloning due to plasmids. Bacteria have the ability to pickup “free” DNA, and this ability when combined with a DNA copying technique (such as PCR). This practice is great because you can have billions of identical bacteria, which allows you to have a control, and an experimental group (exposed to the DNA), to figure out exactly how that altered DNA is going to affect the bacteria. I am hoping this class in combination with MB 310 will be the ones where I truly get to learn more about bacterial cloning in an in depth process.
