• Question: Have you ever cloned an animal?

    Asked by anon-200235 to David on 7 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: David Walker-Sünderhauf

      David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      Nope, way too complicated for me – I just work with bacteria, and the cloning I do just involves individual genes, not whole organisms!

Comments

  • Photo: anon-200941

    anon-200941 commented on :

    why do you just clone bacteria?

  • Photo: David

    David commented on :

    For my project I’m looking at antibiotic resistance, so bacteria are the most important type of organism for this work.
    On top of that, to do general experiments, for example find out what protein a specific gene makes, it is easiest to clone this into bacteria!
    Animals like mice or even fruit flies need several weeks or a whole day to be able to fully develop and reproduce, the fastest bacteria can do this within 20 minutes! This super-quick generation time means you really don’t need to wait long for the bacteria to produce more of the DNA and protein you gave them, and you can even study effects that might take hundreds of generations to evolve in a week or so!