DNA is the sole informational polymer in most organisms. Proteins are the major operational polymers. And RNA fits somewhere in between. RNA plays a role in information transfer and in operations. The focus of my talk today will be on how these polymers do their thing.
Replication duplicates the genetic material.
And transcription and translation take the information that is carried by the informational molecules and transmit it to the operational ones. If you understand DNA, RNA and protein, and replication, transcription and translation, you are well on your way to understanding the essence of molecular biology. Let's begin by briefly discussing the polymers. I'll follow this with a description of the three processes. These aggregate into enormous strings , hundreds of millions of nucleotides long.