Animations

Here are the links for the DNA replication and the transcription/translation animations. I had some problems getting the Flash movies to load using Firefox, but found that IE worked fine.

As a quick aside, please be careful when you use internet resources to study. Be sure that the information you are getting is from a reputable source. A student in block 1 today had some questions about the "5-inch cap" on mRNA, and what it meant that rRNA "forms a gibbet." The student stated that the information came from a website. Upon Googling, I found the site, and the entry on RNA types. I scanned a few of the other posts, and found that grammer is a bigger issue than getting facts wrong. However, the info about RNA is pretty bad.

There is a 5' (five prime) cap added to mRNA molecules. The problem may have come from misreading the prime symbol (') as the symbol for inches, as in I am 5'10" tall. However, the symbol for inch is ", not '. And if the cap were 5 inches long, assuming that each nucleotide is 3.4 Angstroms apart, there would be approximately 370,000,000 nucleotides in the cap. Seems a little much, cosidering the whole human genome is only 3,000,000,000 base pairs.

As far as the gibbet....I have no idea where that came from.

So please be midful of this when searching for help online.