Antibiotic Resistance Genes: Boon or Bane? |Biomedgrid

Bacteria are very dynamic organisms in nature and possesses exclusive ability to uptake foreign DNA and replicate them. This unique ability works in their favor to survive environmental changes and evolution. For instance, bacteria can uptake DNA that makes human insulin which can be useful to treat type I Diabetes. This very reason makes bacteria the most popular organism, that is widely used in research for amplifying desired gene and the process is called bacterial transformation. Bacterial transformation was first reported in 1928 by Griffith [1] in Streptococcus pneumoniae where some bacteria take up foreign genetic material from environment by horizontal gene transfer (HGT).