BIOL 151 Study Guide - Final Guide: Spliceosome, Intron, Central Dogma Of Molecular Biology
Document Summary
A cell builds the proteins it needs from instructions encoded in its genome according to the central dogma of molecular biology. The first step in converting genetic information into proteins is transcription. Synthesis of an mrna version of the instructions stored in the dna. Rna polymerase performs this synthesis by transcribing only one strand of dna from 3" to 5" The other dna strand is called the non-template, or coding strand (he will only call it the non-template: matches the sequence of the mrna except that rna has uracil (u) in place of thymine (t) Like the dna polymerases, an rna polymerase performs a template-directed synthesis in the 5" to 3" direction of the rna it builds (by reading the template dna in the 3" to 5" direction) Unlike dna polymerases, rna polymerases do not require a primer to begin transcription. Rna polymerase cannot initiate transcription on its own.
