Anthon Money

11/12/14
Biology 1615 Lab
Final
For my article I chose Selection for animal cells that express the Escherichia coli gene
Coding for xanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase by R. C. Mulligan and P. Berg who are
students at Stanford University. They decided to study cultured monkey and mouse cells as they
synthesize and Escherichia coli enzyme called xanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase. I
will go through the background of the experiment, go thought the steps and methods, and lastly
end with the results of the experiment.
What they are trying to find is how monkey and mouse cells produce the enzyme as all
other mammals do not produce enough xanthine to be efficient. What they do in the experiment
is they compare the monkey and mouse cells to other mammalian cells to see the differences of
the amount of enzymes produced. This is helpful as if this is studied more into we will see that
this can be used to make guanine for DNA and RNA either to replace damaged DNA or to add to
it.
So what they did is they obtained some mammalian cells that include the monkey cells
and mouse cells and they injected the cells with viruses but a wall they ran into is after they
infect a cell with a virus it will die after so they combated this problem by developing
transduction vectors to stabilize the cells. They were able to accomplish this by taking E. coli and
isolation a gene from it that takes and makes a pathway for purine. After the prepreration they
put the monkey cells and the mouse cells in Eagle cells and with a lot of other preparation
including letting it sit for a day. After the day passed they moved the experiment to another

location and they would continue to do this every 3 days for 2 weeks. Now they begin to
measure the colonies that formed in experiment for E. coli.
The results were found that cells in the experiment that did not receive DNA orbit cDNA
did not survive while the cells that were had it made 2-25 daughter cells per cell and the ones
with cDNA or other modifications made 2-8 times more that their parent cells. A question that
did arise was did the modified DNA make it into the parent cells or would it only be linked to the
daughter cells. But in the end they found the more cDNA inserted in the cell yielded more XMP
which is a converted version of xanthine that can be used to create xanthine-guanine.
Even though this is a more dated article I found a lot of good information from it and now
going to go further and see if any more has been built onto this experiment or if any ground
breaking evidence has broken though because of this.

Credit all to
Selection for animal cells that express the Escherichia coli gene
Coding for xanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase; R. C. Mulligan and P. Berg; 1981

http://www.pnas.org/content/78/4/2072.full.pdf