Biology Blog #2: Ten Things To Know For The First Test - October 1, 2011

1. Remember! 5' to 3' is always needed!
2. Adenine and Guanine are called purines, double bonded, and Cytosine and Thymine are called pyrimidines, single bonded.
3. Remember the codons! You don't need to memorize all 64 of them, but for the most part, remember that AUG/ Met is the start codon, while UAA, UAG, UGA is the stop codon. Kinda reminds you of U.A.O.H. from Chouriki Sentai Ohranger haha.
4. Transcription in four parts: Initiation, RNA polymerase binds to double helical DNA at promotor 5'TATA3' (Tata box ;D) region. Unwound and shows template strands. Elongation: mRNA is synthesized from 5'-3'. Remember that T is no longer there. Termination, it's stopped. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, AAUAA!
5. Introns are inside, and exons are outside. Introns are discard because they are coding, while exons code. Simple?
6. Enzymes. Somehow science has a lot of them.
1. DNA helicase: Unwinds the double helix.
2. DNA ligase: it's like the glue stick. it holds all the DNA together at the end when it comes to recombinant DNA.
3. Dna gyrase: relieves the tension of unwinding DNA during replication. now if only there was something like that for long days of school
7.  The lagging strands have short segments called Okazaki fragments built on them by the DNA polymerase III.
8. Remember the old folks.
1. Rosalind Franklin: Used X-Ray imaging to find hazy images of DNA and what it looked like.
2. James Watson and Francis Crick: the crooks that took Franklin's findings to prove their own theory.
3. Frederick Griffith: discovered teh process of transformation.
4. Erwin Chargaff: discovered and founded Chargaff's rule: A=T and G=C
5. Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase: suggested DNA is hereditary material.
9. DNA polymerase II is really RNA polymerase II
10. RNA doesn't like "T"ea. That's why when it drinks "T"ea, Uracil is excreted instead. (Vulgar, yes, but it helps me.)