Question

What are molecular Scissors? Give one example. Explain their role in recombinant DNA technology.

Answer 1

Molecular scissors are also known as restriction enzymes, they are called molecular scissors as they cut the genetic material at specific ends and cleave the ends with another or foreign strand with the help of ligases. Restriction enzymes are enzymes which have certain kind of restriction such as DNA strand is a long strand so to cut the strand restriction enzymes are used as they cut the strand at specific sites.

Complete answer-
Examples of molecular scissors are Eco RI, Bam H etc. restriction enzymes are of two types based on their cleaving patterns- endonucleases and exonucleases. Endonucleases are the enzymes which cut the DNA strand from inside or inner portions and exonucleases similarly cut the strands from outer edges to inner parts.
A foreign piece of DNA is used to alter because to insert genes of choice for use in recombinant technologies. The piece of DNA which is used to be altered needs to be ligated with a vector.
The cutting of gene is being done for culturing new varieties of gene of interest, for genes to be more resistance, disease free. The piece of strand which gets altered is also needed to identify before inserting vectors or any other factor.
In order to conduct experiments recombination is required and restriction enzymes are a major tool used in recombinant DNA technology. The strand should be a high-quality piece of gene which should be free from any gene defects, the strand from which that particular gene is extracted should be also defect- free, no mutation should be seen.

Note:
As we discussed about molecular scissors, the scissors are used in recombinant DNA technology for producing new variants of any product. Biotechnology deals with genes of interest that are being isolated to form new variants of transgenic animals. Molecular scissors are an important asset for Recombinant DNA technology.