Dwarfism can be prevented in children that are unable to produce the human growth hormone (hGH) if the hormone is administered to them during development.
- Dwarfism can be prevented in children that are unable to produce the human growth hormone (hGH) if the hormone is administered to them during development. Recombinant hGH for this use is produced by bacteria. Some of the steps involved in engineering bacteria to produce the hormone involved extracting RNA from people who did produce the hormone and then reverse-transcribing the RNA to DNA before cloning it into a bacterial plasmid. It would have been technically simpler to just clone the hGH gene from human DNA. Why were the RNA extraction and reverse transcriptase steps essential if the end goal was expression by a bacterial cell?
