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Rab8 Essay

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Finding the function of Rab8 using Knockout mice Abstract: Experiments were done to find the function of Rab8, knockout mice were experimented on and those with mutant phenotype died from malnutrition. Another experiment was done to find out whether the abnormalities from poor efficiency or mislocalization of Rab8 in the small intestine was the cause of death. Rab8 is a targeting protein that helps guide vesicles containing nutrition to the small intestine. It was found that mice that had phenotypes that showed poor efficiency or mislocalization of Rab8 had suffered from malnutrition as the apical proteins were found to be mislocalized to the lysosomes which degraded the proteins malnourishing the mice leading to death of starvation. …show more content…

They also used a western blot test from crude extracts of the phenotypes to test out the effectiveness of the system, they found that in the reverted flox/flox had the same amount of that of +/+. -/- and geo/geo bot mice both died after 3-4 weeks of birth and the flox/flox were observed to be as healthy as the +/+ and through this -/- and geo/geo were known as the mutants (Sato, 2007). The apical proteins were found to be mislocalized to lysosomes and then degraded in the Rab8 knockout mice, this led to malnutrition as there was poor absorption and digestion of the milk and ultimately killing the mice from starvation. This was found through an experiment determining whether abnormalities in the small intestine were the major cause of death by breeding Flox/+ mice with transgenic mice that express Cre recombinase under the Villin promoter. It was observed that all mouse that expressed one floxed allele died at the same time as the mutant mouse whereas mice with two floxed alleles were healthy but died after 12 weeks of birth due to reduced efficiency of Rab8 (Sato, 2007). The healthy two floxed allele mouse showed a mosaic expression of Rab8, the Rab8 negative cells had large sub-apical vacuoles like the knockout mouse however in the Rab8 positive cells there weren’t any vacuoles. The first experiment is different to other experiment; the first experiment was trying to see what happened

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