A pharmaceutical company is choosing between two biotechnology platforms for the commercial production of a complex human therapeutic glycoprotein:
Which of the following is a major biological advantage of using the transgenic cloned goats instead of the bacterial bioreactor system?
The bacterial bioreactor system has a much slower rate of protein production and a lower overall yield per unit volume than lactating transgenic goats.
Downstream processing and purification of the therapeutic protein from goat's milk is significantly simpler and cheaper than purifying it from a bacterial culture.
The transgenic goats can perform essential post-translational modifications, such as glycosylation, which E. coli is unable to carry out.
Cloned animal herds possess high genetic diversity, making them highly resilient to infectious diseases compared to monoclonal bacterial cultures.
39 exam-style questions on OCR A A Level Biology Cloning and biotechnology. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.