Week 5 Study Guide

From DNA to Traits: Mutations, Gene Expression and Viruses
I. Flow of information from DNA to RNA to proteins
A. DNA a. What is DNA?

b. What is a gene?

c. What shape does a DNA molecule have?

d. Who discovered the structure of DNA?

e. DNA molecule i) DNA is a chain of ___________________. ii) What are the 3 parts of a nucleotide?

iii) Every nucleotide is identical except for its base. What are the 4 kinds of bases?

iv) In what way do bases pair together and what do we mean by the idea that bases have complementary pairing?

v) Which bases pair with which others?

f. Knowing the order of _______________ in 1 strand of DNA is enough to know the order in the _______________ strand of the DNA molecule. B. Describe the steps for copying DNA.

C. How does DNA determine our traits?

D. What are the two stages required to go from DNA to trait formation and where does each stage occur in a cell? 1)

2)

E. Transcription a. What is transcription?

b. What does RNA do?

c. Describe the structure of RNA

d. How is RNA formed?

e. Describe how an RNA strand is complementary to a DNA strand.

f. Which bases on DNA lead to which bases occurring on RNA?

g. Describe the general steps in transcription.

h. What happens after this RNA is created?

F. Translation
a. What is translation and where does it occur?

b. How are proteins made?

c. What are proteins made of?

d. How do RNA bases code for amino acids?

e. What are codons?

f. What do codons code for?

g. What is the genetic code?

i) How many codon combinations are there?

ii) Do all codons code for amino acids? If not, what do the other codons code for?

iii) Why do all proteins begin with the same amino acid?

iv) Do multiple codons code for the same amino acids?

v) Do any codons code for more than one amino acid?

h. How similar are codons among different