We discuss the aspects of "string biology" that will be important for us to understand in this course.

1. The structure of DNA & RNA; polymer chains of nucleotide bases on a backbone. Bases: adenine (), thymine (), cytosine (), guanine (), and uracil ()
2. The "Central Dogma" of Biology.
   1. "The central dogma of molecular biology deals with the detailed residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information." (Crick, Nature, 1970) The Central Dogma is, in fact, not dogmatically true. Retro viruses and other mechanisms can reverse this flow of information. See, for example, Wikipedia.
   2. DNA carries the information necessary to build most components of life.
   3. Polymerase transcribes select portions of DNA into messenger RNA (mRNA).
   4. In eukaryotes, where there is a self-contained nuclear envelope, the spliceosome is responsible for splicing out potentially unnecessary pieces of mRNA: one or more introns.)
   5. The mRNA is translated by the ribosome into chains of amino acids, or polypeptides forming proteins.
      • [A] alanine ()
      • [R] arginine ()
      • [N] asparagine ()
      • [D] aspartic acid ()
      • [C] cysteine ()
      • [E] glutamic acid ()
      • [Q] glutamine ()
      • [G] glycine ()
      • [H] histidine ()
      • [I] isoleucine ()
      • [L] leucine ()
      • [K] lysine ()
      • [M] methionine ()
      • [F] phenylalanine ()
      • [P] proline ()
      • [S] serine ()
      • [T] theonine ()
      • [W] tryptophan ()
      • [Y] tyrosine ()
      • [V] valine ()
3. Operations that might be performed on DNA & RNA.

Resources needed for this class:

• A readable article on the basic dogma of biology.
• Ian Stewart's article on the frozen accident.
• A page from the The Double Helix. Close, but no cigar.
• The dog genome paper.
• The SARS genome. Only 29,000+ base pairs!
• The genetic code
• The genome browser
• The National Center for Biotechnolgy Information (NCBI)

Readings for next class:

• Please browse through the basic genetics primer at NCBI. We will be discussing the various operations that can be performed on DNA in order to perform Sequencing.
• For this Friday's talk (Bio, 2:35pm), please read Drew Endy's paper on Synthetic Biology.

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