Study Questions

1. When Gurdon and his students transplanted nuclei from adult frog tissues into enucleated, unfertilized amphibian eggs, they found that the proportion of injected eggs which developed past the blastula stage was influenced by the original status of the adult cells from which the transplanted nucleus was plucked. For example, nuclei from cells in the skin were poor donors; on the other hand, if the skin cells were placed in tissue culture and allowed to multiply in vitro the nuclei from cultured cells gave a much higher proportion of developed embryos. Can you speculate why this might be so?

ANSWER

2. The probe for detecting a particular DNA sequence may be RNA or DNA from either the sense or antisense strand. On the other hand, a probe used to detect a particular mRNA, while it still may be either RNA or DNA, has to be the sequence from the sense strand. Can you explain why this is so?

ANSWER

3. There has been considerable controversy about the nature of cells involved in regeneration of an organ or part of an organ. It has often been argued that non-specialized “reserve” cells (those not very far along on a given differentiation pathway) are the source of cells from new tissues, and that overtly differentiated cells cannot change to form another cell type. Using the example of limb regeneration in salamanders, propose an experiment or approach that might help evaluate this hypothesis.

ANSWER

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