Part 1: What is it
Experiment 2: Transcription and Translation
DNA codes for all of the proteins manufactured by any organism (including you!). It is valuable, highly informative and securely protected in the nucleus of every cell. Consider the following analogy:
An architect spends months or years designing a building. Her original drawings are valuable and informative. She will not provide the original copy to everyone involved in constructing the building. Instead, she gives the electrician a copy with the information she needs to build the electrical system. She will do the same for the plumbers, the framers, the roofers and everyone else who needs to play a role to build the structure. These are subsets of the information contained in the original copy. Your cell does the same thing. The “original drawings” are contained in your DNA which is securely stored in the nucleus.
Nuclear DNA is “opened up” by an enzyme called helicase, and a subset of information is transcribed into RNA. RNA is a single strand version of DNA, where the nucleotide uracil, replaces thymine. The copies are sent from the nucleus to the cytoplasm in the form of messenger RNA (mRNA ). Once in the cytoplasm, transfer RNA (tRNA) links to the codons and aligns the proper amino acids, based on the mRNA sequence. Protein builders called ribosomes float around in the cytoplasm, latch onto the strand of mRNA and sequentially link the amino acids together that the tRNA has lined up for them. This construction of proteins from the mRNA is known as translation.
|Materials | | |
|Blue beads |*You Must Provide | |
|Green beads | | |
|Red beads | | |
|Yellow beads |In this experiment: | |
|Pop-it® beads (8 different colors) |Regular beads are used as nucleotides. | |
|*Pen or pencil |Pop-it® beads are used as amino acids. | |
Procedure
1. Use a pen or pencil to write a five word sentence using no more than eight different letters in the space below.
2. Now, use the red, blue, green, and yellow beads to form “codons” (three beads) for each letter in your sentence. Then, create codons to represent the “start, “space” and stop” regions within your sentence. Write the sentence using the beads in the space below:
3. How many beads did you use?
4. Assign one Pop-It® bead to represent each codon. You do not need to assign a Pop-It® bead for the start, stop and space regions. These will be your amino acids.
5. Connect the Pop-It® beads to build the chain of amino acids that code for your sentence (leave out the start, stop, and space regions).
6. How many different amino acids did you use?
7. How many total amino acids did you use?
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