Basics of Molecular Biology

by Martin Tompa.

We begin with a review of the basic molecules responsible for the functioning of all organisms’ cells. Much of the material here comes from the introductory textbooks by Drlica [4], Lewin [7], and Watson et al. [10]. Good short primers have been written by Hunter [6] and Br¯azma et al. [2]. What sorts of molecules perform the required functions of the cells of organisms? Cells have a basic tension in the roles they need those molecules to fulfill: 1. The molecules must perform the wide variety of chemical reactions necessary for life. To perform these reactions, cells need diverse three-dimensional structures of interacting molecules. 2. The molecules must pass on the instructions for creating their constituent components to their descendents. For this purpose, a simple one-dimensional information storage medium is the most effective. We will see that proteins provide the three-dimensional diversity required by the first role, and DNA provides the one-dimensional information storage required by the second. Another cellular molecule, RNA, is an intermediary between DNA and proteins, and plays some of each of these two roles. [via]

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