BIOL 401 Midterm: Exam II Study – Lecture 11
Document Summary
Our genetic code is composed of introns and exons, a 5" cap, and a 3" tail. By changing the splicing patterns of these codes, millions of different proteins can be formed from a single template. Two important characteristics to know about the code is that the code is non-overlapping (ribosomes move down three bases every time), and they are commaless (continuous from start to finish). An interesting enzyme we discussed in this lecture is called polynucleotide phosphorylase. This particular enzyme is important because it allows for the artificial synthesis of rna templates. Rna, but if added in very high amounts it can actually synthesize ribonucleotides into a strand. It can be added to a cell-free system, and a dna template is not required. This is useful when you need to control what sequences end up on dna strands during experiments.