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Inside every nucleus of every one of your 37 trillion cells, there is a complete set of instructions — about 3 billion base pairs of DNA — for building and running the entire human body. But DNA never leaves the nucleus. So how does it direct the construction of thousands of different proteins in the cytoplasm?
The answer is a two-step process called protein synthesis. Think of DNA as a master blueprint locked in a safe (the nucleus). A working copy — messenger RNA — is made from the blueprint and carried out to the factory floor (the ribosome), where it is read by molecular workers (tRNA) who bring in the correct building materials (amino acids) one by one. The result is a protein: an enzyme, a structural component, a hormone, or one of thousands of other molecules that make life possible.
This is arguably the most important biochemical process in biology. Get the message wrong — by even a single base — and the consequences can range from no effect at all, to a completely non-functional protein, to a life-threatening disease. Sickle cell anaemia, for example, results from a change in just one base pair out of the entire genome.
OCR A note: This topic does not appear in AQA, Edexcel, WJEC, or OCR B. It is unique to OCR A Biology A (J247) and is examined at Higher tier only. It has appeared as a 6-9 mark question in every Higher paper from 2022 to 2024.
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