Now, one of the best examples and the one you need to know about of genetic modification is how bacteria have been engineered genetically to produce human insulin. If you are a type 1 diabetic, you cannot produce the human insulin. You have to inject it for the rest of your life. We used to use insulin from pigs, but it doesn't work as well as human insulin. Now the problem is, how do you make enough human insulin for millions of diabetics?
The answer is to get the gene that makes human insulin from a person's DNA. Cut it out and stick it. into a bacteria.
The bacteria will read that gene as if it's one of its own and manufacture the protein insulin as if it was one of its own proteins. So you're basically using this bacteria, a bit like a slave, to produce shingles. human insulin. The great thing is that once you've done it once, the bacteria reproduce millions of times, pass on that gene every time because it reproduces asexually.
And so very quickly, you can get a population of billions of bacteria all making human insulin a little factory for us via genetic modification. So to go through that process in detail, step one, remove a plasmid from a bacteria. Cut it open with some restriction enzymes.
Step three, locate and remove human insulin gene using the same restriction enzymes. You're going to cut out the human insulin gene from someone's DNA using those same restriction enzymes. Then you need to combine that insulin DNA with the plasmid.
To do that, you're going to need your ligase enzymes, so then they get combined. Step five, the bacteria are then incubated with the new recombinant plasmid, and they take it up. The bacteria will then take up that plasmid as I said and start to produce the insulin. You can then get that bacteria to reproduce and it will pass that gene on to all the other bacteria.