Whether she or he is studying a gene from a microbe, a plant, a frog, or a human, a biochemist will often begin by cloning that gene into an artificial mini-chromosome, called a plasmid, and then engineering a specialized strain of E. coli to accept that plasmid as part of its own genome. By piecing together the gene of interest with other synthetic DNA instructions, the biochemist can trick E. coli into not only churning out dozens of copies of that plasmid per cell but also dedicating the majority of its resources to converting the gene of interest into thousands of copies of the protein
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