In: Biology
EcoRI is a restriction endonuclease enzyme. The enzyme is isolated from species E. coli and therefore the name part ‘Eco’ is used as it symbolizes the species from which the enzyme is isolated. The R part of the name symbolizes the particular strain (such as RY13) from which the enzyme is isolated. The ‘I’ part denotes that it was the first enzyme isolated from this strain.
EcoRI cleaves DNA double helix strands at specific sites to form DNA fragments. EcoRI has applications in a wide variety of molecular genetics techniques including cloning, DNA screening and deleting sections of DNA in vitro. EcoRI can generate sticky ends of DNA. The non-site-specific cleaving of DNA double helix by Eco RI is known as star activity. The star activity depends on the conditions of the reaction and can be used extensively in molecular genetic experiments.