what is Messenger RNA and how does it work??
In: Biology
In a simplified sense: it’s a single stranded copy of a segment of DNA that cells generate in order to provide instructions for synthesizing proteins
In your cells, you have the nucleus, that contains the DNA. The DNA is a double-stranded sequence of nucleotides that contains coded information that other organites of the cell can use to build proteines, but it never comes out of the cell.
Instead, there are in the nucleus enzymes that can copy the information of the DNA into RNA (a single-stranded sequence of nucleotides) which is called “messenger” because it is used to transfer this information from the nucleus to the organites that produce the proteines.
DNA is very valuable, you dont want it hanging around in the open so its kept safe inside the cell nucleus. Pretend DNA is the Declaration of Independence.
If you want to read the Dec of Independence, you cant just go and grab the original one. You take the original and make copies of it to distribute to the rest of the people. mRNA is a copy of a certain sequence of DNA that allows genes to be read while keeping the original source safe.
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