Question

Instrumental Analysis:

Amber is an excellent source of preserved ancient organisms. Many bacteria remain dormant inside insects trapped in the amber and may be extracted, cloned and studied. Since the amber may be dated using geological methods, such investigations are a valuable source of ancient genetic information for biologists. Suggest a method that will permit the determination of metabolic products such as nucleic acids, short peptides and fatty acids obtained from cloned ancient bacteria. State any special instrument conditions or configuration.

Answer 1

Amber is a material which helps for the preservation of the ancient organisms.in recent years a number of studies have claimed that ancient bacterial cells and their DNA can survive for many millionyears within sediments,amber,and halite

The most common explanation for that is finding that the microbes have remained in a stage of dormancy,known to be associated with high stress tolerance and resistance to adverse conditions.like the endospores of Bacillus and Clostridium,remain metabolically inactive and therefore no active DNA repair.

models suggest that unpaired genomic DNA and peptides and fatty acids fragmented into pieces in size under optimal frozen conditions and much faster in warmer settings,Thus the contravesry of viable ancient bacteria is heightened by absence of convincing evidence for mechanisms by which a cell can withstand damage to DNA and other unstable molecules such as ATP over geological timescales,we use molecular biology techniques and direct measurement of CO2 production from permanently frozen samples to show that dormancy is inferior to low-level metabolic activity with DNA repair as a long-term survival mechanism in ancient bacteria.

The succesful samples we can obtain by amplification of 4-kb bacterial DNA are likely to present in the permafrost core samples importantly decreasing sequence diversity with age of the recovered bacterial DNA furthur help in authenticity of reports samples.

Ancient viable bacteria is exist in two different states 1.dormant state and 2.metabolically active state

1.dormant state:in this stage no metabolic activity and therefore no active DNA repair takes place.

2.metabolically active:The DNA molecule is suseptable to many forms of chemical modifications commonly observed form is hydrolytic deamination.

we directly tested the sample frozen for respiration in the form of CO2 production under close to ambient.

The long term DNA survival is noticed in the Actinobacteria warriants.