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Posted by knabe on May 8, 2008, 1:41 pm, in reply to "Re: Is a clone as good as the original?"
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clones are not the same, either in their chromosomal DNA, mitochondrial, or methylation. methylation is little methyl groups CH3, a carbon, which has 4 bonds, so 3 are taken up by hydrogen, and then the 4th site binds to an area of dna. this methylation pattern IS transmitted from mother to offspring. there is even evidence of methylation from the sire as well. environmental factors are stored here. differences may be such as feedstuffs, amount of feed, latitude, you name it can be stored in methylation. chromosomal dna can change simply by point mutations, and areas which may be unstable, such as direct or inverted repeats and may change during meiosis, mitosis. little is known about this. an easy example is huntingtons disease. the more copies of this gene you have, the more severe the symtpoms. this was not known till recently when the repeat sequence was finally finished, and it was noticed people had a different number of copies. these repeats of genes may not be represented correctly in reference samples of a genome, ie cattle, which is being done by baylor, and i think it's an inbred hereford, so between breeds, there may be different numbers of copies of genes, but it won't be known, unless and until more seqeuncing is done. there are several ways to determine if there is more than one copy.
back to differences. gamma rays can cause mutations. if the source tissue for the clone has been mutated by these rays, no one will know until the clone has been fully sequenced. a great study would be to "fully" sequence clones and look for differences. Pacific Biosciences will sell seqeuncing machines in 2010 for over $500,000 dollars and claim to sequence a human genome for a hundred dollars in 4 minutes.
the same could be done for these clones, to see the differences.
clones also have different length telomeres, and maybe so do their offspring, though from what i've seen, the offspring from clones have "repaired" telomeres, which can affect ageing. it would be great if you could eat a supplement to repair them. they are basically long repeats of ATATATATATATATATATATAT. the same sequence exists in centromerers and a few other spots, usually a lot shorter than telomeres and centromeres, otherwise you would have too many sites to bind during meiosis etc. perhaps these are the areas that attach to the bundle fibers, i don't know, though i think someone does.
bottom line. clones are NOT the same.
methylation patterns could be examined as well, but it only requires one thing, a grant, which i can't believe hasn't been done yet. it's a great topic.
kids today have great opportunities in science.
bored yet?
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