

So if you could then begin to sort through larger fragments of random pieces of DNA from humans and find a much larger piece that has that one variable piece you're interested in to get you closer and closer to the gene of interest that you're really trying to find. It didn't know what street it was on or what house it might be in, but it gave you a town to begin to look among. That would give you an address in a town for where that gene might be. So what this allowed you to do was to link a particular piece of DNA to a region of a chromosome from a family that had a particular disease within that family. Gesteland: Before doing human genetics was tough going. Interviewer: So the technology is restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), what did that allow scientists to do that they couldn't do before?ĭr. Then subsequently Ray White was involved in that conversation and the four of them published a monumental paper that really changed the way human genetics was done. They got up to the whiteboard and were drawing pictures of how it would work and how many markers it would take to map human genes, but it was very clear that that was likely to be a real turning point.
#RESTRICTION FRAGMENT LENGTH POLYMORPHISM RFLP FULL#
And at the end of that meeting Botstein and Davis, whom I had known well from earlier years, stopped by my lab as I was setting it up and they were just full of excitement and enthusiasm. So the discussion that went on at Alta was could this same kind of technology be developed for humans. Ray White, who was not at the meeting but was at The University of Massachusetts, had done experiments in fruit flies discovering these highly variable pieces of DNA and shown that you could really use these to localize where genes might be on the Drosophila genome. And there was a discussion about the possibility of using these DNA markers that are variable from person to person as a way to do a mapping of genes and humans. And they had two guest speakers, David Botstein and Ron Davis and Marc Skolnick, who was here at the time, was also at that meeting. Gesteland: So I came in 1978 in August and I was busy setting up my lab when The Department of Biology had a department retreat up at Alta. Can you talk about what that meeting and why it was so important?ĭr. You know, something that is lore here at The University of Utah is this Alta meeting. Ray Gesteland, emeritus professor of Human Genetics at The University of Utah. The Science and Research show is on The Scope. Up next on The Scope.Īnnouncer: Examining the latest research and telling you about the latest breakthroughs. View the animation below, then complete the quiz to test your knowledge of the concept.Interviewer: A glimpse in Utah's storied history in the field of genetics. They are useful in DNA fingerprinting but do not affect the organism. Otherwise the RFLP differences among individuals have no functional significance.

Restriction mutations in protein coding regions may be removed by natural selection if they result in a less functional product. Because these sequences are fairly short they are likely to appear by chance at random locations in the genome due to mutation. Restriction sites are short sequences recognized by restriction enzymes. For example individuals that are homozygous for the sickle cell allele have a serious illness while individuals that are homozygous for the ‘normal’ allele or are heterozygous do not have the illness. Many genetic diseases are the result of a polymorphism at a single locus. For some polymorphisms there are major consequences in having one genotype versus another. Restriction fragment Length Polymorphismsīiology, Eighth Edition (Raven) Chapter 17:īiotechnology Restriction fragment Length Polymorphisms What is the significant of the number and location of RFLPs a particular individual has in its genome? A polymorphism is a genetic characteristic that varies among individuals in a population.
