General ---------Biology------------------------------------------------ ------------------Online--------------------------------------------------- Ch. 16 Molecular Basis of Inheritance

Figure 16.16 summarizes much of the chapter material.  You should be able to label each molecule in the figure and explain its function.  When a crime lab takes a few cells of tissue from underneath a victims finger nails, or a hair sample (need the root to have cells) found at the scene, they make large amounts of the DNA by using the chemicals in this figure.   They put these chemicals in a test tube, plus plenty of DNA monomers, and the reaction that occurs in the S phase of the cell cycle, occurs in the test tube.  Twenty or thirty cycles of this chemical reaction are required to make enough DNA to see and use in DNA finger printing (see Ch. 20).