Hi everyone! New to the forum. YFG question!

[jasrod829]

I am starting my junior year now working on my biology degree. I started my molecular biology course today and thought I should join a forum to further educate myself with the topics you all like to discuss.

 

Anyway, we will be working on a lab (one I'm sure most of you had done) in your molecular bio class. We will be cloning a Drosophila gene and fuse to GFP. Then design an experiment that uses the GFP-tagged protein.

 

We have to come up with a YFG. Professor also told us to look for proteins that are likely to be synthesized in the Kc167 cells. I understand that I should choose a particular gene I should be interested in. I was just curious with what kind of genes you've tried. What genes did you find interesting to study? Any suggestions? I was looking at tumor suppressor genes but wanted to see what the forum had to say. Please excuse me, this is my first molecular biology course. Last bio course was a cell biology class.

 

 

Thanks! Cannot wait to read what is on the forum.

[CPG]

You may find it a useful starting place to glance at a quick resource for what has been done experimentally, peer-review, and published. Since this is Drosophila, you can head on over to the appropriate page on FlyBase. There's some characterization there that will give you some back ground info, including expression profiles. In my opinion anything there can only become "Your Favorite Gene" when you've stumbled across a reason to care about it and think its cool. (I'm assuming that's what you meant by "YFG"). By its nature, that is subjective, so I'd suggest scanning some of the expression info in the link until something pops out at you.

 

I find molecular biology experiments interesting when they stem from a biological question.

 

For example, if you find out what a protein DOES you might end up suspecting that it could be useful for the cell to produce under certain conditions, but undesirable in other conditions. Is this the biological strategy that is used? Is expression turned on and off the way you would predict? If you can provide the conditions and compare groups you can ask that question (aka do the experiment).

 

As another example, you might ask whether a protein known to be in the cell is localized to a specific place within the cell in order to do its job. If you suspect that the protein interacts directly with DNA, then you tag it with GFP and the nucleus - but nothing outside the nucleus - lights up green that subcellular localization would be consistent with your hypothesis about where it functions. I suspect if you're using GFP you'll have access to some sort of fluorescence microscopy in order to collect data from the experiments, in which case you'd want to make sure you have the necessary resolution to see that kind of thing before you design an experiment.