Question

Recombinant DNA technology allows scientists to mass-produce some human proteins by transferring human genes into bacteria. The characteristic of bacteria that would most likely prevent Factor VIII from being produced in this way is that bacteria:

Answer 1

Answer: Bacteria lack a mechanism for splicing out introns

Explanation:

Factor VII gene is 186k nucleotides long while the protein is 2332 amino acids long. This lenght discrepancy is due to introns interrupting gene, because the cell first transcribes the entire gene and then cuts introns out of the transcript. At the end, it splices the remaining pieces. Prokaryotes don't perform splicing so it can not edit out introns from the primary mRNA transcript. To produce an eukaryote gene in prokaryotes it is necessary to use a reverse transcriptase to get a cDNA sequence without the introns, and then insert that into a bacterial genome.