Talk:Complementary DNA

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 2 February 2021 and 14 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Skys1324.

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Untitled

Bioconductor is a software that can analyse cDNA thingymabobs...— Preceding unsigned comment added by Frap (talk • contribs) 15:55, 1 June 2006

Where does RNAse H enter the equation? --Seans Potato Business 15:48, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

- It's used in better methods of second strand synthesis than the ones described in the article. The article needs updating to discuss these methods since the description given is rather outdated and rarely used JackAidley (talk) 18:14, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Proposed merge

• Do not merge. The two are very different things, C-DNA is one of several possible helical shapes (a, b, c... etc.) that DNA can naturally take whilst cDNA refers to a 'complementary' strand of DNA often formed during experiments. SPWright (talk)

SPWright is right. C-DNA is a DNA conformation and cDNA is (basically) a coding DNA sequence. DO NOT merge these two articles. -- Nunø Agøstinhø • ^{(Say It!)} 13:27, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

Is cDNA manufacturing deterministic?

The recent Supreme Court decision Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics had some discussion of cDNA and that article links to cDNA, so it likely that news of this case will bring more traffic to this page. The Supreme Court decision held, "a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated." But the court ruled "cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring." That idea raises a question that this article could shed light on. While cDNA is not naturally occurring, is it in some sense deterministic?

If there is an identified naturally-occurring gene, is there a standard laboratory process to take that gene, get its mRNA template, remove the introns to generate an intron-free mRNA template, and reverse transcribe it to cDNA? If so, is the resulting cDNA totally determined by the starting DNA, so from any given sequence of original DNA, there is exactly one corresponding sequence of cDNA? It would be helpful if the article could discuss this, to help readers think about the Supreme Court's decision. —Anomalocaris (talk) 03:15, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

I haven't read the text of the actual Supreme Court decision, but the reporting appears to confuse the concept of "synthesized DNA", with the concept of "cDNA", which is one of many processes for synthesizing DNA, and a particularly non-versatile one at that. Assuming that the decision itself reflects the press, I'd like to see a small discussion of this in the article text. 216.66.5.53 (talk) 13:38, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Is cDNA single- or double-stranded?

The very first sentence of the article states, "In genetics, complementary DNA (cDNA) is double-stranded DNA synthesized from a messenger RNA (mRNA) template...". In my humble opinion, this is completely untrue. Reverse transcriptase uses an RNA template to synthesize a single strand of complementary DNA (the cDNA). Unless your RT reaction contains active DNA polymerase, no dsDNA is going to be made. Yes, the first amplification step of any subsequent PCR reaction will be to create dsDNA using one of the primers (forward?), so log phase amplification doesn't begin until the second amplification round, but until that happens the cDNA is either single-stranded or partially hybridized with the RNA template. I am proposing to change the first sentence to single-stranded, then explain later what I just did above. Any thoughts, objections, support, abuse?

DadOfBeanAndBug (talk) 04:55, 11 September 2015 (UTC)