Intercellular Gene Transfer Lab Report

Introduction
A mutation is a heritable change that is passed from the mother cell to progeny cells. Mutations may lead to good, bad or neutral phenotypic changes in the organism. They may occur spontaneously as in random DNA replicative errors or may be induced by mutagenic chemicals or radiation. Besides mutations, another way that bacteria achieve gene diversity is through the three known mechanisms for intercellular gene transfer. They are transformation, a genetic process which free DNA is incorporated into a recipient cell, transduction, a process which bacterial virus transfers DNA to another cell, and conjugation, a form of horizontal gene transfer which requires cell-to-cell contact.
The

This time, we used minimal agar plate. The plate was labeled into two sections, Trsf and Mut. The Trsf colony on the LB plate was looped and spread on the Trsf section of the minimal agar plate and the Mut was done likewise. The plate was then incubated at 30℃ until the next course day. Only the wild-type Acinetobacter gene enables the bacteria to grow on minimal medium, therefore if growth was seen on the Trsf section then we would expect that the mutant had transformed and picked up DNA from its surroundings. The Mut section is expected to have no growth as mutants require the amino acids leucine and valine to grow which is not provided in the minimal medium.

Results Figure 2. Testing of mutant mixed with DNA, mutant bacteria and DNA on LB medium
Growth was observed on the Transformed (Trsf) section and the Mutant (Mut) section but not on the DNA section. Due to human errors, the photo of our experiment was lost, but we have obtained similar results as from group1.1 and their photo is presented.

Figure 3. Testing of transformed and mutant bacteria on minimal medium
Growth was observed on the Transformed (Trsf) section and not on the Mutant (Mut)