ABSTRACT
In current biotechnology and molecular biology research, gene transfer and generation of transgenic animals play a major role in exploring the functions and biology of the gene of interest. To characterize the transgenic animals well, it is necessary to address an important question: How many copies of the transgene have been integrated into the genome of the transgenic animals? This chapter describes the standard and widely used approach: Southern blotting for determining the transgene copy numbers and for identifying the multiple insertion sites in the transgenic animals.1-2
In addition, this chapter provides some important examples of biocalculation such as molecular weight (MW), moles, molarity, conversions among or between DNA, RNA, and proteins, oligonucleotides, peptides, statistic mean, variance, and standard deviation (SD). These concepts, equations, and practical calculations are important and widely used in current biotechnology research. However, a lot of people including graduate students, researchers, and some faculty members are confused about these methods.3-4 One can imagine that if buffers or solutions for important research projects were made incorrectly (e.g., wrong weight and molarity), the outcomeincluding data, results, and conclusions-would be signi„cantly impacted by these buffers and/or solutions, which may contain DNA, RNA, proteins, compounds, or other solutes. Therefore, this chapter attempts to help clear things up by describing several important concepts and methods, particularly practical biocalculation.
