Like the title says, im having trouble visualizing what it means when it says eukaryotic mRNA is monocistronic and prokaryotic mRNA is polycistronic. Please help.
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Monocistronic means there is a single protein encoded on that piece of DNA. This is how eukaryotes do translation, so there will be a cap as well as a poly-A tail on the mRNA.
Polycistronic means multiple proteins are encoded within the same piece of mRNA, and is common with prokaryotic translation. This means there are multiple start and stop codons on the same piece of mRNA, each relating to one of the proteins encoded.
To add on to what was said above, prokaryotes typically want to compress their genomes down to be smaller than eukaryotes and so you can sort of think of polycistronic as having a Swiss Army knife (maybe with a knife, scissors, a fork, whatever) and as monocistronic as having a knife separate from scissors, etc. The Swiss Army knife takes up a lot less space than having a collection of individual tools does.
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