Name: Barbara
Status: Educator
Age: 50s
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: April 2004
Question:
What happens to mRNA after translation?
Replies:
mRNA is a temporary copy of the "recipe" for making a gene product. Suppose you are Mrs.
Field's of cookie making fame. You have the chocolate chip cookie recipe in the vault at
the bank. Every time you want to make a batch, you have to go to the vault and copy it,
but you only want it to be a temporary copy. As soon as you are done making a batch, it
is destroyed. So the cell's nucleus is kind of like the vault, and the mRNA is kind of
like the temporary copy. It can be copied many times by ribosomes simultaneously, but
it breaks down in the cytoplasm quickly and needs to be made over and over.
vanhoeck
It can be (and almost certainly is) translated more than once, with additional ribosomes
loading onto it. At some point, enzymes in the cell will break the RNA down.
NEWTON is an electronic community for Science, Math, and Computer Science K-12 Educators, sponsored and operated by Argonne National Laboratory's Educational Programs, Andrew Skipor, Ph.D., Head of Educational Programs.
