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Molecular biodiversity
Our customer service:
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Molecular identification of organisms from complex populations
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Sequence analysis of marker genes or other discriminatory genetic regions
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DNA sequence alignment [read more ...}
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Cluster analyes [read more ...}
Our customers provide:
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Mixed organic samples or DNA extracted from mixed populations or sequences (GenBank, FASTA, ...)
What is a "molecular diversity"?
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This is a simple approach to explain why we can use DNA for investigating
the relatedness of organisms.
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All organisms contain DNA (desoxy-ribonucleic acid) which consists out
of coding regions (genes) and non-coding regions (spacers and other regions).
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Genes contain information on the structure of RNAs (ribonucleic acid) and most
RNAs are translated into protein sequences by the cells. Proteins give organisms
functionality and structure. Therefore, organisms are quite sensible with respect
to changes in their fundamental units, their genes. This is the reason why genes are
quite stable or in other words: changes in gene structure can influence the fitness
of the cell in a disadvantageous way.
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Certain genes (e.g. the SSU rRNA genes) occure in all organisms and, therefore, can
be used to compare these organisms on a molecular level. One can even reconstruct the
evolution of organisms using comparative gene analysis.
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In other regions of genomes, e.g. spacer regions, changes can be quite dramatic
without influencing the fitness of the organisms. These regions can be used to
compare closely related organisms, e.g. populations of a species, where most of the
gene sequences are identical or too similar to yield a sufficient discrimination.
Keywords: molecular diversity, DNA extraction, cloning, PCR, SSCP, sequencing, 18S rRNA gene, 16S rRNA gene, rbcL gene, ITS region, gene, spacer region, sequencing, alignment, cladistic analyses, phylogeny, phylogenetic approach, tree visualisation
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Methods