Preview - Central Dogma

Making our own!

Questions

Please answer the questions below.

Groups of 3 nucleotides can be called a “codon.” Using information from the model on the last page, why do you think it’s helpful to have a term for a group of 3 nucleotides?

File:OSC Microbio 11 04 GenCode.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Most scientists who work with DNA, RNA, and protein use a key to translate from the language of nucleotides to the language of proteins. This key is called a codon table and there are 2 versions above-both have the same information presented in slightly different ways.  Use one of the codon tables to translate the following mRNA sequence into amino acids:

aug-acc-ggg-cga-agg-uag

 

SAQ: What do you notice about the 4th and 5th amino acids and 4th and 5th codons in the sequence you translated?  How can you explain what you saw (hint: look back at the codon tables)?

Use the model above to check your answers.  Enter each codon (trio of mRNA letters) into the model and press enter after each to watch the amino acid sequence grow. Screenshot the polypeptide (protein) sequence (“PolyPSeq”) and upload it here.

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Try your own mRNA sequence: write the mRNA sequence from above but make a couple of changes.  What is the effect on the amino acids?

SAQ: Using the information from this page and the last one, write out the algorithm (the instructions) that you, acting as the ribosome  followed to put together the amino acids in the correct order to make a protein based on the mRNA sequence.  Be specific!

Optional: Here is a picture of what the amino acids look like.  What do you notice about them?

Essential Amino Acids: Chart, Abbreviations and Structure | Technology Networks

Optional: check out the code used by the program (https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/100898229/editor/).  What do you notice?

Optional: In the behind-the-scenes look at the scratch modeling, can you write, in words, what one of the groups of blocks means (pictured is an example of a group of blocks)?

Notes

These notes will appear on every page in this lesson so feel free to put anything here you'd like to keep track of.