Building Blocks

There are a few levels of building blocks to forming biological systems.

The central dogma of biology states that:

1. DNA encodes RNA (transcription)

   1. There are coding regions (extron) and non-coding regions (introns) for a genome. Therefore, the transcription step is more complex than translate = dna => dna.replaceAll('G', 'U')

   2. Expression or non-expression of certain genes allows for modularity and circuit creation.

2. RNA encodes Amino Acids (which fold to proteins) (translation)
   1. Technically speaking, triplets of RNA encode amino acids.
   2. Amino acids form peptides.
   3. The poly-peptide chain forms in 3-dimensional space to create proteins.

Below is a cartoon from Nature of the process.

Transcription and translation, as per the central dogma of biology. Figure from Nature Education