Mitochondrial DNA Lab Report

Quantifying the COX1 Gene within the Mitochondrial DNA of a Potato
Introduction
Respiration is a very important process for every living organism. While it is typically thought of as breathing in oxygen, and exhaling carbon dioxide, like all things, it must take place at the cellular level. The electron transport chain is responsible for cellular respiration. The process uses four complexes; the fourth is cytochrome c oxidase. Cytochrome C oxidase is responsible for the reduction of oxygen to water. There are thirteen subunits that make up the complete complex. Each of these is coded by its own gene in the DNA. Most of them are in the nuclear DNA; however three are encoded by mitochondrial DNA, including COX1 (Karp, 2010) (Li, Youfen et al.).
Mitochondrial DNA is a circular molecule, that codes for 13 unique proteins (Cooper,
From here it can be determined that the probe is either too specific, that it can only bind to itself, or that the COX1 gene is not in the mitochondrial DNA. It is not likely that a potato does not have the COX1 gene, indicating that the probe was too specific. This could mean that the COX1 gene collected from the plasmid is different than the one from the potato, or that some other gene was labeled instead of the COX1 gene. Most likely the probe was specific enough that it could bind to the uncut plasmid DNA, but not to the mitochondrial DNA, or the  DNA. The uncut plasmid DNA sample was given to us by another team working in the laboratory (Mitchell and Gytis), that should not affect anything within the results of the experiment as all the probes were combined before adding to the membranes, but it could be a factor. It could be possible that the smear indicating mitochondrial DNA in Figure 2a is not DNA, but debris instead. Overall, the experiment was inconclusive of how many copies of COX1 there are in the mitochondrial DNA of a