Blog 7 : Bacterial Transformation and Transduction

In bacterial transformation and transduction, Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer was the inventor who discovered bacteria transformation and transduction and was even rewarded the 1996 Lemelson-MIT Prize for Invention and Innovation. It all started with a collaboration in Hawaii in 1972 and the conference's topic was bacterial plasmids which are circular segments of DNA thatis a  permenant source the cells carrying them with antibiotic resistance and other medical benefits. Boyer's lab recently isolated an enzyme that could be used to cut strings of DNA into precise and "cohesive" segments to carry the code for a pre-determined protein and be attached to other strands of DNA. Cohen developed a method to introduce antibiotic-carrying plasmids into certain bacteria and isolating/ cloning genes carried by plasmids. Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer put their resources together resulting with Boyer's enzyme would allow Cohen to introduce specific DNA segments to plasmids and to use those plasmids as a vehicle for cloning precise, previously targeted strands of DNA. In four months,  their labs had succeeded in cloning predetermined patterns of DNA.