Protein Synthesis Lab

Protein Synthesis has three steps. First of all, there is transcription. During transcription, the DNA is replicated into an mRNA strand. Then the mRNA strand leaves the nucleus and enters the cytoplasm. In the cytoplasm, the mRNA arrives in the ribosome. The ribosome reads the mRNA 3 bases at a time, which is called a codon. It translates the mRNA strand into a language that the protein can understand, and that language is called amino acids. The end result is a chain of amino acids and this chain folds and twists until it becomes a protein.

Based on the experiment, I can conclude that mutations are very random in a sense that they might have a large effect or maybe no effect at all on the organism. The mutations that seemed to have the greatest effect on the gene sequence and the protein is deletion. When I simulated deletion, the DNA sequence changed significantly. In the DNA sequence without any mutations, the protein had a long chain of amino acids. However, when there was a deletion of a base pair, the mutation formed a stop codon very early in the sequence. This made the protein very short. Other mutations that I simulated were insertion and substitution. Insertion made a difference big enough in the sequence to change the protein. When I simulated substitution, the protein did not change at all. This proves that the effect mutations have is completely random. Mutations do have a difference in the impact of where they are placed. The protein will have a bigger difference if the mutation is in the beginning instead of later on in the sequence.

In step 7, we got to choose our own mutation. I chose to do deletion and deleted the first and third base of the entire sequence. The reason that I chose to do deletion was because it made the biggest impact and I wanted to test how far a mutation can change the protein. After I finished translating from the RNA strand to the amino acid language, I found out that with my mutation, the protein never had the start codon, so the protein never started to be made. Yes it definitely does make a difference if you put the mutation in the beginning than in the end. The reason for this is if the mutation is at the beginning, there is a higher chance that there will be a mutation that will make an impact on the protein.

One mutation that causes a disease that we have not learnt in class this year is a disease called Hypertrichosis. Hypertrichosis, also known as "werewolf syndrome", is a very rare disease and is a disease that is formed by a mutation in chromosome 8. The chance of getting this disease is one in a billion and only 50 cases have been reported. This disease creates a lot of hair on the face, ears and the shoulders.