How long does it take to clone something?
It depends if you ar talking about animal cloning or cloning of a gene into a plasmid… The first taked long time and fails often: You need to isolate a nucleus from a cell, inject it into and egg, from which the nucleus has been removed, and introduce it into the womb of a surrogate mother. Cloning of a gene into a plasmid is easier: you can either start from a PCR reaction, with specific primers upstream and downstream of the gene of interest and using a mRNA library as template, or you could start from another plasmid containing the sequence of the gene of interest. In either cases, you need to digest the product with specific restriction enzymes, as well as the receiving plasmid, then ligate plasmid and insert with a ligase, transform the ligation product into bacteria, isolate the colonies with the plasmid in and make a maxi-prep to isolate the new plasmid. All toghether, I would say 3-4 days if all works.
