Transforming Bacteria

In this simulation, you are going to transform E. coli bacteria using the heat shock technique. The purpose of bacterial transformation in the lab is to facilitate the uptake of DNA that contains a gene of interest.

What do you need to know before beginning this lab?
You will transform bacteria with the recombinant pARA-R plasmid that contains the gene of interest, red fluorescent protein (rfp). Once transformed, the rfp gene can be expressed using the bacteria’s own machinery. The pARA-R plasmid also contains a gene for ampicillin resistance (ampR), which allows us to identify transformed bacteria by their ability to grow in the presence of ampicillin.

The pARA-R plasmid also contains an origin of replication (ori) to ensure the plasmid is maintained in the bacterial population, as well as the pBAD promoter and araC gene, which regulate expression of the 𝘳𝘧𝘱 gene.