Genes provide information for building proteins. They don’t however directly create proteins. The production of proteins is completed through two processes: transcription and translation. Transcription and translation take the information in DNA and use it to produce proteins. Transcription uses a strand of DNA as a template to build a molecule called RNA. The RNA molecule is the link between DNA and the production of proteins. During translation, the RNA molecule created in the transcription process delivers information from the DNA to the protein building machines. Through transcription the sequence of bases of the DNA are transcribed into the reciprocal sequence of bases in a strand of RNA. Through transcription the information of the DNA molecule is passed onto the new strand of RNA which can then carry the information to where proteins are produced. RNA molecules used for this purpose are known as messenger RNA (mRNA). A gene is a particular segment of DNA. The sequence of bases in for a gene determines the sequence of nucleotides along an RNA molecule. Only one strand of a DNA double helix is transcribed for each gene. This strand is known as the ‘template strand’. The same template strand of DNA is used every time that particular gene is transcribed. The opposite strand of the DNA double helix may be transcribed for other genes. During translation, the information of the strand of RNA is ‘translated’ from RNA language into polypeptide language i.e. the sequence of nucleotides is translated into a sequence of amino acids.
