Question

VISUAL ANALOGY The master plan of a building shows how to build and place important parts of the building, such as walls, pipes, and electrical outlets. On the building site, workers use copies of the master plan called blueprints to show them what to do. The master plan is kept in the office. Explain how mRNA works like a blueprint in constructing proteins.

Answer 1

Answer:

The master plan is represented by the ordered sequence of nucleotides along DNA strands which are used to build proteins. The building blocks are nucleotide bases of nucleic acids (either DNA or RNA) and amino acids of proteins. The messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules represent the blueprints to synthesize proteins from specific regions of DNA (genes). Workers are represented by the structural molecular machinery (e.g., ribosomes) required to decode the genetic information contained in the mRNAs during the process of translation.

Explanation:

The DNA molecule is composed of four different nitrogenous bases or 'building blocks' (i.e., Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine), while in RNA the Thymine is replaced by Uracil. During transcription, a specif region of the DNA molecule called 'gene' is used as template to synthesize a complementary RNA sequence, usually a messenger RNA (mRNA). Subsequently, this mRNA moves to the ribosome where its sequence is used as template to create a protein by a process called translation. The amino acids are the building blocks to build proteins.