WHat kind of biologist would I ask about questions relating to transfection, and it's possible applications in producing new proteins?

Question

anonymous · Answer

I'm looking into the possibility of using transfection into a tissue in an animal we have more of, such as sheep, or cows, that uses similar ingredients as seen in whatever tissues in a horseshoe crab produce limulus amoebocyte lysate, to produce L.A.L. in greater quantities, but, I'm sure that there's a step I'm missing, or else someone would have done this, already. I attend college, so, I want to know which type of biology teacher to try and contact, to figure out the issues with my theory.

yousir · Answer

my biology teacher

anonymous · Answer

Just gen bio, or any particular sub-field?

anonymous · Answer

Transfection, as you probably mean it, is the induction of unnatural protein expression through transfecting it with foreign DNA in form of a plasmid.

There are some circumstances that you might have forgotten.

1: if you want to change some kind of cell into another kind, then that's impossible.

2: If you want to just change the parts of the cell that produce this kind of environment, then you have to know every single protein that is involved, plus the amount of it in your cell.

3: If you know that much about the process, then cultivating cells in a live animal is not smart. That's because the immune system of the host would attack the cells you transfected. (ask if you wanna know why)

4: You need the cell LYSATE, right? So only the cell contents would matter. You could try to transfect some arthropod stem cells (I suppose there is these kind of cells). That's because the horseshoe crab is an arthropod (like spiders, scorpions and such), and you want your expression system to be closely relative to the horseshow crab. That's how you make sure that the complex LAL system is mostly represented and your test works.

Summing up: if cells produce that kind of environment, you can probably culture them without having to 'transplant' cells into a forgein organism. Also, that wouldn't work.