med4耶鲁大学公开课-生物医学工程.doc

Frontiers of Biomedical Engineering: Lecture 4 Transcript January 24, 2008 back Professor Mark Saltzman: So, were going to continue talking today about DNA. In particular, were going to focus today on sort of how to manipulate and use DNA in some applications, and this is a huge area of science and technology. You know this, you can - its hard to pick up a newspaper or a news magazine without hearing some new application of DNA technology. What Im going to do is focus on a couple basic things that turn out to be really important for general applications, and then Ill talk not in too much detail about a few applications of DNA that youre probably familiar with to try to give you a framework to hang this on. This, I think Chapter 3, describes fairly well the things well talk about today. Youve probably already noticed that theres some material thats set aside from the text in boxes, and I encourage you to particularly look at those boxes for this chapter. Theres one on DNA fingerprinting, for example, that gives you a little bit more detail about that specific technique; another one on production of therapeutic proteins. Ill talk about these both a bit today but I encourage you to read those for more information. I want to start where we left off last time. We talked about the structure of DNA, how it works in terms of a physical chemical model of the DNA molecules. We talked about base pairing and how that leads to this process of hybridization or very specific matching between complimentary strands. We talked very superficially about the biological process going from DNA to protein, so the process of transcription, RNA processing, and translation to produce a protein. I ended with this picture that shows you a little bit about control of gene expression. The important concept is that, while every cell in your body has the capability of making all the proteins that are needed throughout your body, not every cell is doing that at any given time. Only certain gene