Describe how fish can be used to determine which cells within a microbial community are actively degrading toluene. assume the genes involved in the metabolic pathway have been sequenced from several microorganisms and vary only slightly from one another.

First, you need to retrieve the FASTA sequences of the already sequenced genes. After that, you should make a sequence alignment on a software like CLUSTALW (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/msa/clustalw2/) to seek for the conserved regions of the gene. Based on this regions, you will design your FISH probe, which for bacteria can start in 33 bp (Ming Tan et al., 2019), but a 200 bp probe is a very suitable size. There are several companies that fabricates this custom probes, and sell all the reagents to perform the experiments. Having this, you will perform your FISH experiment to see which cells are actively degrading Toluene.

Explanation:

a unit of heredity that is transferred from a parent to offspring and is held to determine some characteristic of the offspring.

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