Central dogma of molecular biology
Imagine you were making a cake, and you have a recipe book that tells you the order and ingredients to put into your cake. That recipe book is like the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology.
The Central Dogma is a set of rules which explain how our cells make different proteins to do different jobs in our body. Just like the cake recipe tells you what ingredients to mix together to make a cake, the Central Dogma tells your cells what proteins to make.
The first step in making a protein is called transcription. Transcription is like copying a recipe from a cookbook onto a piece of paper. In the cell, the recipe is stored in long strands of DNA, which is like a cookbook. A special enzyme called RNA polymerase reads the recipe and makes a copy of it, called an RNA transcript.
The RNA transcript is like the piece of paper that you copied the recipe onto. It's a copy of the recipe that you can take with you, instead of carrying around the whole cookbook.
The second step is called translation. This is like taking the piece of paper with the recipe on it and using it to make a cake. In your cells, the RNA transcript is taken to a special organelle called the ribosome.
The ribosome reads the RNA transcript and uses it as a template to build a protein. The ribosome matches the sequence of the RNA transcript with the appropriate amino acids, and uses them as building blocks to create the protein.
So, in summary:
The Central Dogma is like a recipe book for your cells to make proteins.
Transcription is like copying a recipe out of a cookbook onto a piece of paper.
Translation is like making a cake using the recipe on the piece of paper.
And just like how you can make different cakes by using different recipes, your cells can make different proteins by using different combinations of RNA transcripts.
The Central Dogma is a set of rules which explain how our cells make different proteins to do different jobs in our body. Just like the cake recipe tells you what ingredients to mix together to make a cake, the Central Dogma tells your cells what proteins to make.
The first step in making a protein is called transcription. Transcription is like copying a recipe from a cookbook onto a piece of paper. In the cell, the recipe is stored in long strands of DNA, which is like a cookbook. A special enzyme called RNA polymerase reads the recipe and makes a copy of it, called an RNA transcript.
The RNA transcript is like the piece of paper that you copied the recipe onto. It's a copy of the recipe that you can take with you, instead of carrying around the whole cookbook.
The second step is called translation. This is like taking the piece of paper with the recipe on it and using it to make a cake. In your cells, the RNA transcript is taken to a special organelle called the ribosome.
The ribosome reads the RNA transcript and uses it as a template to build a protein. The ribosome matches the sequence of the RNA transcript with the appropriate amino acids, and uses them as building blocks to create the protein.
So, in summary:
The Central Dogma is like a recipe book for your cells to make proteins.
Transcription is like copying a recipe out of a cookbook onto a piece of paper.
Translation is like making a cake using the recipe on the piece of paper.
And just like how you can make different cakes by using different recipes, your cells can make different proteins by using different combinations of RNA transcripts.
Related topics others have asked about: