AP Biology Students Create Transgenic Organism

 

Today Mr. Kuhn’s AP Biology students are celebrating their creation of a transgenic organism (organism with genes from more than one species). 

The students engineered a gene from a jellyfish for phosphoresence (glowing green—called pGLO) into E. coli bacteria. In order for the gene to be expressed, an intricate procedure had to be followed to heat shock the bacteria to take up the gene into its DNA. Then the bacteria had to sense the presence of a sugar in the growth medium, and use it as a switch to turn on the newly acquired gene for pGLO. Those bacteria that took up the gene but did not have the sugar switch present in their growth medium grew only with a white color. 

Congratulations on this amazing lab achievement!