From: Kai Blin Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 16:01:59 +0000 (+0100) Subject: Add DNA animated gif, more text X-Git-Url: http://git.samba.org/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=1b49084d63b25f4b70ff7cab528eeb8ddb0b8368;p=kai%2Flca12.git Add DNA animated gif, more text --- diff --git a/dna_animation.gif b/dna_animation.gif new file mode 100644 index 0000000..50516d0 Binary files /dev/null and b/dna_animation.gif differ diff --git a/script.txt b/script.txt index 9295598..7c5bc43 100644 --- a/script.txt +++ b/script.txt @@ -67,7 +67,26 @@ function, you'd say "enzyme". So let's have a look at how proteins are made. As mentioned before, the instructions on how to build a protein are stored in a blueprint, the gene. Genes are encoded on nature's universal storage system, a -molecule called "desoxyribonucleic acid", or in short DNA. +molecule called "desoxyribonucleic acid", or in short DNA. DNA was discovered +in 1869 by Friedrich Miescher at the University of Tübingen, in this lab in the +basement of the Castle of Tübingen. + +DNA consists of a linear backbone (the desoxyribose). This backbone carries the +actual information-containing molecules, the nucleobases or bases in short. +There are four different bases in DNA, adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, +abbreviated as A, T, G, and C respectively. DNA turns out to be an efficient +and robust storage for information. This is partly because in nature a DNA +strand always comes together with a backup copy, the so-called complement +strand. The complement strand is an inverse copy of the original strand, with +adenine being complemented by thymine and guanine being complemented by +cytosine. Even if only one of the strands is present, this can be used to +recover the complete set of information. The two DNA strands usually wind +arournd each other in the twisted double helix you usually see when people talk +about DNA. + +In bioinformatics, you usually only store one strand because calculating the +complement strand is trivial. So all you need to store is a (potentially pretty +long) sequence of As, Ts, Gs and Cs. (Quip about a graded test at the end of the talk)