Is DNA the only thing passed from generation to generation?

My understanding is that DNA is the genetic material which contains everything needed to form an organism.

But a while ago in biology, I learnt that all DNA does is code for proteins. So one combination of bases means that a cell produces a particular protein.

But what does this have to do with the organism as a whole? How does producing different proteins mean that a cow has 4 legs and a human 2?

Am I missing something?

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a. a protein produced by a recombinant bacterium
b. any animal that contains recombinant DNA
c. any cell that contains recombinant DNA
d. an exact copy of a DNA, cell, or organism

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I’m trying to learn this stuff from a textbook (without a lab), so it’s all pretty abstract…

If I were to want to sequence an entire gene in an individual organism… could I just use PCR to amplify the gene and then sequence that with Sanger Sequencing? Presuming the gene is longer than than 800 nucleotides, is there a way to "primer walk" or "shotgun sequence" using solely the products of PCR?

Or, am I just supposed to clone fragments of the DNA using vectors, and then use those for the sequencing and primer walking?

If I am supposed to clone the fragments, then should I still use PCR to make the original fragment, and then chop THAT up with restriction enzymes to get the smaller fragments… or is PCR an unnecessary step in all this.

I’m kinda confused. Any help would be very much appreciated!

Thank you!!!
thank you all very much for your answers.

yutgoyun, if you’re still there, are you suggesting that I clone the entire gene in one plasmid? To do that, wouldn’t I still need to cut the gene with a restriction enzyme so that it could recombine with the plasmid?

please excuse my ignorance… this is all completely new to me.

thanks again.

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There are a number of ways through which genetic engineering is accomplished. Essentially, the process has four main steps.
1) Isolation of the gene of interest
2) Insertion of the gene into a vector
3) Transformation of cells of organism to be modified
4) Tests to isolate genetically modified organism (GMO)

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Complete The Following :

( toxin – lipid – archaea – homeostasis – antibiotic – vaccine – prion – virus – viroid – pathogen )

1- …………………….. prokaryotes belonging to one of the three domains of life.
2- A doctor may prescribe a (n) ………………….. if you have a bacterial infection.
3- ……………………. non-polar molecule made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
4- ……………………. condition of constant internal conditions.
5- You may have received a (n) …………………… in the form of a shot to prevent getting the flu.
6- Any poison produced by an organism, including the oil produced by poison ivy, a (n) …………….. .
7- Made of RNA only …………………………. .
8- Causes infections disease …………………….. .
9 – Made of protein only ………………….. .
10 – Made of RNA or DNA and a protein coat ……………………………… .

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I need help with some of this problems, I can’t seem to find the answer! I tried looking through the book, but didn’t really help!
1. When DNA is cloned outside of an organism, the process is referred as ………..
2. List three examples of Vectors used in recombinant DNA techniques.
3. What feature created in DNA by restriction enzymes allows DNA to be reconnected?
4. When your engineered plasmid was assembled, what three major features did it contain that must be in all recombinant DNA plasmids?
5. What limits the size of the DNA strand inserted into a plasmid?
Any help is appreciated!!!

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This is an argument I hear quite a bit, that life had to be designed because it’s irreducibly complex. Usually it’s made about single cells. If you take any one part away, the cell ceases to function. So, intentionally designed and made because it ceases to function without all the parts in place.

Well, fine.

The trouble I’m having with it is you can make that argument with virtually every living system you see once it’s reached maturity, but we know it’s a load of rubbish.

If, for instance, I was to take myself (or any one of you) and start pulling out major structures, you’d cease to function. If I removed your heart, or brain, or kidneys, you’d keel over and die. Even if I took simpler structures such as your arm, and began removing things from it, the arm would cease to function properly.

Yet, we know neither me nor you nor anyone else popped into the world as is. We all started the same way, except maybe for those human/alien hybrid clones being grown at Area 51 on the fake moon landing set in an effort to slowly infiltrate humanity in some sort of Arcturian Zionist plot.

The rest of us began as two very simple and undifferentiated cells. Those two cells set out to build you from the ground up, and slowly put all the structures in place that are now completely interlocking and you can’t live without. At one point, though, you had exactly none of them.

Life was perfectly capable of moving from a simple point to one we would think of after the fact as being irreducibly complex because once it’s up and running it’s too complex to go backward. However, life keeps proving on a constant basis its basic construction has no such limitations when moving forward.

And that’s a mature, complex organism. Cells themselves are made in a much less complex fashion. It isn’t an intricate system of interlocking parts, but a loose collection of parts floating and bobbing around in a bag of cytoplasm…

And those are the more complex cells out there. Lovely as they are, we know that eukaryotic cells (and if you don’t know that term, chances are you shouldn’t be trying to answer this question) aren’t the simplest form life can take. It can exist on a much simpler prokaryotic level which is little more than a loop or two of DNA in a wrapper.

They don’t even reach "snicker bar cell" complexity, and lack pretty much all the cell structures people point to in order to say life is irreducibly complex. Life can exist without them. It does so all the time.

Further, we know there are entire classes of those which consume inorganic materials for food, and which reproduce asexually. That means we know at its simplest and most basic form life actually can and often does manufacture itself from nonliving things. In other words, we know at its simplest and most basic form, a set of simple inorganic compounds which come together in the right form will begin assembling the other available inorganic compounds in the environment around them into organic life, and that’s what we’ve directly observed (so no pesky fossil record or guessing… we done watched it happen with our own peepers).

So where’s the irreducible complexity coming into play?
It isn’t secular biologists who are generally arguing God has to enter into the equation because you simply can’t trace life from the basic environment forward.

Science itself has no need for God to answer its questions. Unanswered questions are simply unanswered, not unanswerable, and the solution is to continue searching, not turn to a philosophical point of view.

If there’s an argument to be made in favor of God having to be injected into the equation, it’s most likely going to be made by someone whose religious beliefs have helped guide their investigation and conclusions. Hence, I asked the question here and not in the science section.

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Can life be manufactured from scratch?

Darwinism was an interesting idea in the 19th century, when hand waving explanations gave a plausible, if not properly scientific, framework into which we could fit biological facts.
However, what we have learned since the days of Darwin throws doubt on natural selection’s ability to create complex biological systems – and we still have little more that hand waving as an argument in its favor.

Hiroshima (1945), is an evolutionist’s paradise; for it is filled with people heavily irradiated, which—according to evolutionary mutation theory— should be able to produce children which are new, different, and a more exalted species. But this has not happened. Only injury and death resulted from the August 6, 1945, nuclear explosion. Mutations are always harmful and frequently lethal within a generation or two (*Animal Species and Evolution, p. 170, *H.J. Muller, Time.

A mutation is a change in a hereditary determiner, —a DNA molecule inside a gene. Genes, and the millions of DNA molecules within them, are very complicated. If such a change actually occurs, there will be a corresponding change somewhere in the organism and in its descendants.

If the mutation does not kill the organism, it will weaken it. But the mutation will not change one species into another. Mutations are only able to produce changes within the species. They never change one kind of plant or animal into another kind.
.

It is a universally accepted fact of chemistry that chirality cannot be created in chemical molecules by a random process.
Another problem with Chirality is that homochiral biological substances racemize in time. This is the basis of amino acid racemization dating method. This method is not very reliable because of the variables such as temperature and pH and the particular amino acid. Racemization is a big problem during peptide synthesis and hydrolysis for it shows that the tendency of undirected chemistry is towards death, not life. This presents enormous problems for chemical evolution ideas as well.
This is why it is such a problem to explain away.

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1) peptide bonds join together amino acids in what type of compound?

2) plasmids are small circular molecules of DNA found in what
prokaryotic organism?

3)proteins contain how many different kinds of amino acids?

4) ribose is found in RNA but is not found in what compound?

5) ribosomes function as a multipart unit. how many parts does this unit have?

6) RNA makes a complementary image of what compound that serves as a template?

7) RNA polymerase catalyzes what process?

the elements of the genetic code are sets of three nucleotides which specify a particular substance. what is the substance?

9) the enzyme DNA Ligase joins paired sticky ends of what type of fragment?

10) three different types of RNA molecules are required to make this organic compound. what is the compound?

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Humans have
a) 46 chromosomes in their body cells
b) 46 chromosomes in their reproductive cells
c) body cells with 46 pairs of chromosomes
d) reproductive cells with 23 pairs of chromosomes
e) the same number of chromosomes in all cells

When one of your cells divides, the new cells
a) manufacture all the organelles from material in the cytoplasm
b) receive enough of the organelles to get going and produce additional organelles as needed
c) produce individual organelles that attach to the spindle fibers and are distributed just like chromosomes
d) receive exactly the same quantities of each type of organelle

Body cells A and B are part of the same organism. Which of the following MUST be true of both cells.
a) they use the same genes
b) they both produce the exact same proteins
c) they produce different kinds of proteins
d) aside from mutations, they have the same chromosomes and DNA
e) same function in organism

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