Question

Controlling the rates of transcription and translation is important in bacteria to avoid collisions between ribosomes and rna polymerases. calculate what the maximum rate of translation by a ribosome in a bacterial cell would have to be, in units of amino acids per second, so as not to overtake an rna polymerase that is transcribing mrna at a rate of 60 nucleotides per second.

Answer 1

The right answer is 20 aminoacids per second.

Transcription is a mechanism for synthesizing RNA from DNA.

Translation is a mechanism for synthesizing a polypeptide sequence from mRNA by converting the nucleotide triplet (codons) to amino acids.

So if one amino acid corresponds to three nucleotides. The polypeptide synthesis rate should be 20 amino acids per second for 60 nucleotides per second.

3 nucleotides ==> 1 amino acid

60 nucleotides ==> 60/3 = 20 amino acids.