Why can bacteria express human genes?

Answer 1

It is my understanding that often eukariotic (multicellular organisms like humans) genes do not "work"(that is, cannot be translated) in prokariotes(bacteria) because bacteria are very very simple compaired to eukaria. Eukaria have complecated structures and mechanisms for the transcription and translation of DNA, bacteria only have plasmids and ribosomes. However, we have been able to get bacteria to use some human genes, most notably the gene to make insulin. Because eukariotic DNA has introns(random, useless segments of DNA) that are removed by special machinery before it is transcribed, scientists must remove all of the introns before inserting the DNA into the bacteria. They do this by obtaining mRNA from a human before it is transcribed in the ribosome, and using the enzyme reverse transcriptase(an enzyme in retroviruses such as HIV) to reverse transcribe the mRNA into cDNA("complementary" DNA that does not contain introns). cDNA can be spliced into a bacterium, and we can often make the genes "work" in bacteria. To answer the question, the genetic code is the same in every organism, so we can make human genes work in bacteria.

Answer 2

Genes store the information or directions for constructing an organism therefore, in general the more complex an organism is, the more information is needed to build it and more genes are needed to store that information.

Answer 3

Bacteria have very small genomes that are easier to work with, and bacteria are easy to grow. Scientists can put a human gene into a bacterial cell to do various tests and experiments with that gene quite easily and without harming any animals or humans.

Answer 4

Bacteria can express human genes because the language of genes is universal among species. If bacteria genes were coded differently humans wouldn't be affected by them.

Answer 5

because some smart scientist figured that out .

Answer 6

To get bacteria some human features,make large amounts of human proteins,dispose of our defective genes,and to find out what the bacteria will do.