Hey guys, The Scientific Waffle here. and guess what: more nucleic acid???!!! Wow! If you read my last post on deoxyribonucleic acid, you know that DNA is a molecule that contains the blueprints for your body. I also talked about RNA a little bit too, and that's what we're going to talk about to day. Let's get started!
RNA (ribonucleic acid) is a molecule similar to DNA. Well, sort of. The RNA that is most similar to DNA is mRNA, or messenger RNA. mRNA look like DNA with half of it gone. Another difference is that instead of having the chemical bases adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, it has the bases adenine, uracil, guanine and thymine. Just like how adenine connects to thymine in DNA, adenine connects to uracil in RNA.
mRNA takes commands from DNA and tells the ribosomes in the cell what to do in the form of the order of the bases on mRNA. For every three bases on the RNA, the ribosome puts one amino acid into a protein. After enough amino acids are combined, a protein is formed. Proteins perform basic functions around the cell.
But ribosomes can't understand the orders given to them by the mRNA. That's where tRNA comes in. tRNA, or translator RNA, translates the orders into something the ribosome can understand. The last type of RNA, ribosomal RNA (rRNA) is inside ribosomes and makes the proteins with the translated orders.
Do all living things have RNA? Yes. RNA is crucial to life. Some scientists believe that in the early times of the earth, life forms didn't have DNA, and the RNA performed the functions of DNA as well as the normal RNA functions.
Well, that's all for today, goodbye!
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