Look for Miller assay (Miller, J.H. (1972) Experiments in Molecular Genetics.
Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.), a simple
cuantitative b-galactosidase assay.
LacZ is very often used as a reporter gene to test promoters (transcriptional
fusions), both in multicopy (plasmids) or monocopy (using transposons or
phages). I guess there are lots of bibliography about this subject.
Sergio
"j.wallis" wrote:
> Hi, I'm new to this NG and I hope someone can help me with a problem I'm
> having. I have to answer the below question for a lab writeup:
>> "The lacZ gene has been exploited heavily in genetic enginerring techniques
> because it is easy to assay both qualitavely and quantitively. Describe two
> of these uses"
>> For the first reason I talked about the importance of lacZ as a reporter
> gene, and how it can be assayed by growing the recombinants on MM Xgal.
> However I'm stuck for a second reason. A friend suggested it could be used
> as a tool to construct gene fusions. I've looked in textbooks and on the net
> for information about these without any success, and was wondering if anyone
> could help me out. Any good textbooks or websites would be useful, bearing
> in mind I'm only a first year undergrad!
>> Thanks in advance.
>> Jamie (University of Nottingham, England)
