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A comment on 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists. Parent comment

Re:'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists by tocomment on Friday May 21, 2010 @06:53AM (#1366972)
Wow thanks. That explains a lot.

What's PEG? The electrical method you mentioned?

So if the DNA pieces overlapped did that overlapping base pairs somehow get removed when the pieces were joined? Otherwise I'd think the next final DNA sequence would look a lot different from what they were intending to copy.

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Re:'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists by aheilbut on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @09:18AM (#1377310)
PEG is the abbreviation for PolyEthylene Glycol. Just a chemical they add that makes the transformation work more efficiently.

DNA, as you probably know, is a double-stranded molecule, and the strands have complementary sequences. When the overlapping pieces are joined, one strand of one molecule overlaps with its complement on the other piece, and vice versa - the pieces aren't just joined end-to-end.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homologous_recombination for all the details.

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