Animal Biotechnology

BACTERIAL ARTIFICIAL CHROMOSOME

• BACs are based on bacterial mini-F plasmids, which are small pieces of episomal bacterial DNA that give the bacteria the ability to initiate conjugation with adjacent bacteria. They have a cloning limit of 75-300 kb.
• BACs are often used to sequence the genome of organisms in genome projects, for example the Human Genome Project.
• A short piece of the organism's DNA is amplified as an insert in BACs, and then sequenced.
• Finally, the sequenced parts are rearranged in silico, resulting in the genomic sequence of the organism.