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Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Which of the two DNA strands contains the genetic message to make a protein?
« on: 12/12/2006 23:26:33 »
Greetings all,
My first post on this here (very interesting) forum, and a thought which occurred to me whilst reading Dawkins' Selfish Gene (for about the 3rd time) and Ridleys' Nature vs Nuture. And apologies if this has been covered elsewhere.
To build up a protein, a piece of RNA needs to be transcoded from the original DNA. And this is controlled by various other proteins etc (I dont really know the details, and for my question Im not sure that they are wholly important). To produce this RNA, the original DNA needs to be 'unzipped', correct? Now, the point of all this rambling is - how does the transcoding machinery 'know' which of the 2 DNA strands are to be coded? I know that the strands are complementary, but they are different.
Anyhoo, just wondering.
Cheers,
Adam
My first post on this here (very interesting) forum, and a thought which occurred to me whilst reading Dawkins' Selfish Gene (for about the 3rd time) and Ridleys' Nature vs Nuture. And apologies if this has been covered elsewhere.
To build up a protein, a piece of RNA needs to be transcoded from the original DNA. And this is controlled by various other proteins etc (I dont really know the details, and for my question Im not sure that they are wholly important). To produce this RNA, the original DNA needs to be 'unzipped', correct? Now, the point of all this rambling is - how does the transcoding machinery 'know' which of the 2 DNA strands are to be coded? I know that the strands are complementary, but they are different.
Anyhoo, just wondering.
Cheers,
Adam