Category BI L07 CACT and VNTR: Is There a Linkage

Abstract The purpose of this science fair project was to see whether there is

linkage between VNTR and the deletion of CACT in Intron 8 of the CD72

gene. This is relevant because the deletion of CACT can be linked to

kidney cancer.



My hypothesis for this project was that there is no linkage between VNTR

and the deletion of CACT.



To do this experiment, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to

amplify DNA samples at the region of the deletion. Then, restriction

enzymes were used to cut samples at the CACT sequence if it exists. In

this way, DNA strands with CACT were shorter. Then, gel

electrophoresis was used to sort DNA strands based on strand length. In

this way, one can tell whether there is a deletion of CACT or not. To see if

the samples have one or two repeats of the tandem repeat, the samples

were amplified using PCR. As samples with two repeats are longer, gel

electrophoresis was used to sort strands based on strand length to tell the

number of repeats. Twenty-two samples were used in this experiment.



Statistical tests were used to analyze the data. a t-value of .,711 was

derived from a correlation coefficient. Howevever, the critical value for a

95% confidence level is 2.2325. It was conclueded that there was no

statistically significant linkage.



In the future,one could do this project with more samples. One might

compare the probability to have a deletion of CACT in this intron between

different groups of people for a future project.



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