Protein Synthesis Lab

  To create proteins, there are two steps, transcription and translation. First the DNA is copied by an enzyme, it becomes mRNA. The mRNA will then travel out the nucleus to reach the ribosomes. mRNA bonds with the ribosome , which reads the sequence of three bases at a time, it is called a codon. Each codon is translated to an amino acids. The amino acids are bonded together to make a protein.

   By changing the bases of DNA, the protein could vary a bit from the original protein or it can be changed greatly. The mutation  with the greatest effect was deletion, for it caused the sequence to be completely changed after it being deleted. It also caused there to be no stop and the codons changed a lot from the original. In  ours, the sequence just stopped in the middle of it. Substitution tended to be the less harmful, for it only changed one codon at the most, but sometimes, it did not even change, for it translated to the same amino acids. A mutation that occurs in the beginning, if it is a deletion or insertion, will have more harmful effects, for the sequence from near the beginning will change widely from the original. One that occurs at the end, will only affect the end of the sequence. If the T was at the end, the sequence would not have changed a lot for only the end would the T have become another letter.

   We chose to test deletion another time, for it was the most harmful of all the mutations. This mutation related to the others because we specifically chose to delete to of the letters T, we mostly modified the T in the other mutations. Instead of only deleting one base, we decided to delete two of them, one near the start and one near the end of the sequence. With this, we saw that the most damage occurred directly near the beginning, this shows that where a mutation occurs, directly affects the results. The closer to the beginning, the more harmful the mutation becomes.

    Some mutation can affect our lives greatly. Though some are not harmful, some others are. A mutation could be very small and just cause some minor problems, or it could cause your body to not function correctly and make your cells not work correctly. Though there are many harmful mutations out there, an interesting and very rare mutation related disease is called Progeria. Progeria causes the child affected to seem to age a lot. Most children with Progeria die at the age of 13, but some do reach their 20's. Their cells mature very fast, and their bodies look and act like if they were an elderly person. Progeria only occurs to one out of around 80 million of children.