Hybridisation?

[claire.anglim]

Hi, I was just wondering what Hybridisation was, and to what degree we need to know it for tomorrow, I've seen it in a number of exams as well as 2007 VCAA, and they all have conflicting answers.

For myself, I interpreted it as a technique that measures the degree of similiarity in different gene pools. so there fore could I just say that it is a tool that can be used to identify DNA.

And in the 2007 answer, I could use the RNA probe to identify specific sequences of DNA that are then joined together to form Hybrids?

[Stojad]

Depends which hybridisation you're talking about. "Hybridisation" in its most general biological sense is the chemical bonding of two DNA strands, where each single strand comes from a different source (i.e. different organism or species). The technique of DNA-DNA hybridisation is used to determine evolutionary relationships between species by comparing the degree of hybridisation of DNA between two species.