Man-made life : an overview of the science, technology and commerce of genetic engineering / Jeremy Cherfas.

  • Cherfas, Jeremy.
Date:
[1982], ©1982
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Man-made life : an overview of the science, technology and commerce of genetic engineering / Jeremy Cherfas. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    52 Restriction just as conspicuous. Sharp's technique made searching for restric¬ tion enzymes a dream. Or, in the dry prose of a scientific paper: the lengthy staining and destaining or autoradiographic procedures which are an integral part of most of the techniques that are used for elec¬ trophoresis of DNA are eliminated. ... In our hands the technique has proved to be a very useful and flexible tool for assaying restriction 1 Q enzymes. Electrode Sample well Figure 2.3 Electrophoresis apparatus. The sample mixture is carried through the gel by an electric current, which separates out the fragments according to size. Sharp's method made everything much easier; separating and seeing DNA was now relatively simple, and the community adopted the method with alacrity, 'Agarose gel electrophoresis did not originate with our Biochemistry paper,' Sharp has told me, 'but was certainly popularized by it.'^^ The DNA detection was another matter. Sharp had spent a year with a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, where he had seen how the dye ethidium bromide fluoresced much more brightly when bound to DNA. He remembered this at Cold Spring Harbor when he wanted to visualize DNA fragments.