Central dogma of molecular biology

so what exactly is the central dogma of molecular biology well really it could just be called the central dogma of all of life because it explains how you and I take this conglomeration of genetic information from each of our parents and how this information gets transferred into generating a full-blown human being like you and me so some very clever scientists Francis Crick and James Watson or Watson and Crick as they're often referred to as are credited with discovering this dogma which they say deals with the detailed residue by residue transfer of sequential information or as Marshall nirenberg who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and medicine once said DNA makes RNA makes protein and I think this simple explanation really just says it all so let's explore this concept a little bit further so we have three major players here DNA and RNA are nucleic acids which are made up of nucleotides and proteins are made up of amino acids and the information starts at the most basic level stored as DNA which can then be restored as DNA when DNA copies itself in a process called replication then DNA can be copied into RNA in a process called a transcription and then finally you can use the information RNA to synthesize a protein in a process called translation now since DNA RNA and protein are linear polymers this means that each individual unit or monomer is only attached to at most two other units so say we have a monomer which is just one unit they are connected and a series like this which makes it a linear polymer and this is the same for DNA if each of these is a deoxyribonucleic acid for RNA if it's a ribonucleic acid or a protein which are just amino acid it's all connected in a linear polymer so what does this mean this means that the specific sequence of each of these monomers effectively encodes in for me and that that transfer of information is faithfully preserved from DNA to RNA to protein each Shalamar sequence is used as a template for the synthesis of the next polymer and you could go into any step in this sequence and determine what the corresponding polymers would look like so in other words you could take DNA and obviously figure out what the aren't corresponding RNA would look like and then what the corresponding protein would look like so this whole process is the central dogma it can sometimes be a little bit tricky to keep all of these terms straight though I'll try to break it down a little bit for how I like to remember them for DNA I think it's pretty easy when you go from DNA and DNA makes a copy of itself it's called replication because DNA is just replicating itself it's making the same copy of itself transcription and translation on the other hand it's kind of easy to get these two terms mixed up one of them obviously is talking about DNA - RNA whereas the other one is talking about going from RNA to protein so if you look at the word transcription it has the word script in it so I think of it as going from one written form to another kind of written form and both use nucleic acids so they both used this sort of alphabet if you will of nucleic acids and so you're just going from one kind of alphabet to the next kind of alphabet translation on the other hand which is also the same term that we use when translating one language to another describes going from nucleic acid to amino acid so it's like you're using one kind of language and going to another kind of language because you're going from nucleic acid building blocks to amino acid building blocks so hopefully that helps you keep these terms straight a little bit so what did we learn about the central dogma just remember the simple statement that DNA makes RNA which makes protein