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A Beginners' Guide to Molecular Biology



You are here: Gene to Function

The fundamental dogma for beginners...

The fundamental dogmaask Dr Chromo! is what explains the difference, and the link between DNA and proteins. This page gives a helpful analogy to help you understand the theory.

Imagine you are a cook... you want to make a nice dishask Dr Chromo!. You take a recipe bookask Dr Chromo! out of the library, you pick a recipe in the book. The recipeask Dr Chromo! in the book is very long, with a lot of pictures and useless things, and you don't want to damage the book by using it in the kitchen. You copy on a small piece of paperask Dr Chromo! all the ingredients you need, and the order you have to put them in the wok (I like Chinese cooking) and you go into the kitchenask Dr Chromo! . With the help of a few utensils, a spoon, a fork, a plate, after a bit of time, you end up with a nice dish.
Who is the cook? I guess it is life itself, because in the cell, it all happens.
Transcription is the act of copying the recipe into a manageable shape. Sorry: it is the name of the reaction which makes RNA by copying it from DNA. An analogy of that is the number of different versions of the same text in the same language. These are transcriptionsask Dr Chromo!. They are used to make the text understood by different people speaking the same language. When you translateask Dr Chromo! it you use a different process, for a different purpose, and the result is in a different language.


DNA ---Transcription--> RNA ---Translation--> Proteins





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