Synthetic Biology quiz

More questions about Synthetic Biology

These visible examples show the question style. LearnClash turns the full topic into ranked duels and spaced repetition.

1. 1 Easy

   Which four bases are used to encode binary data in synthetic DNA storage?

   Answer: Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine

   Why: A 2017 Science team wrote an operating system and a film into DNA and hit 215 petabytes per gram, all in A, C, G and T.

2. 2 Medium

   What is the purpose of adding a degradation tag to a synthetic protein?

   Answer: Controlling its cellular lifetime

   Why: Bacteria's own ssrA tag does the job: its last three amino acids swing a tagged protein's half-life from 40 minutes to 110.

3. 3 Hard

   Why are synthetic yeast chromosomes designed without repetitive DNA sequences?

   Answer: To prevent recombination

   Why: Sc2.0 went further: all 275 tRNA genes moved to a new 17th chromosome, because busy tRNA genes stall replication forks.

4. 4 Easy

   What targets do bacteria naturally use CRISPR systems to destroy?

   Answer: Viruses

   Why: Proof came from yogurt in 2007: dairy bacteria hit by phages filed scraps of the viral DNA into their CRISPR array and survived the next attack.

5. 5 Medium

   What causes genetic drift in synthetic bacteria over many generations?

   Answer: Random mutation accumulation

   Why: Mutations are only the start: a broken circuit costs less energy, so mutant cells outgrow the engineered ones, sometimes within 20 generations.

6. 6 Hard

   Which codon is most often repurposed to encode non-canonical amino acids?

   Answer: Amber stop codon

   Why: E. coli carries just 321 amber stop codons, and in 2013 a team swapped every one for UAA, freeing UAG as a blank slot for synthetic amino acids.