Class Journal Week 2

Nicole Anguiano

1. What is the biggest discovery that I made from these readings?
   • The biggest discovery that I made from these readings was the existence of selenocysteine. Coded by UGA (typically only a termination codon in the majority of organisms), it is only differentiated from the typical termination codon by a hairpin loop in the mRNA. The fact that such a tiny difference in the structure of the codon makes such a dramatic difference was incredible to me, especially considering the fact that in the organisms with the selenocysteine, UGA also codes for a termination codon when it does not have the loop (Brown, pg 14).
2. What part of the readings did I understand the least?
   • Many of the details of Nirenbirg's experiments were very confusing to me. While I understood the overall purpose of the experiments and the results found from them, the exact details of the methods of the experiments were difficult for me to understand.
3. What is the relationship between the genetic code and a computer code?
   • The genetic code can be represented in binary, the language of computers. Each nucleotide can be mapped to a binary sequence (for example, A - 00, C - 01, G - 10, T - 11). With this mapping, the genetic code can be represented equivalently in binary. DNA can be considered like a large computer program that serves not only the purpose of storing data, but also running the functions that determine the actions that a particular cell will take, the proteins that will be created and relatively how much of them should be, and also regulates itself to determine which functions need to be run at any given time (Moody, pg 3).
   • Considering DNA as a program, it can be thought that the DNA is a program written in a higher level language. The RNA is what is created when the program is run - it is the assembly or machine code that is then processed by the computer. The proteins then are the results of the program, for example, an output on the screen or a change in a GUI (Moody, pg 4-5).

Nanguiano (talk) 11:29, 9 September 2015 (PDT)