I am a microbiologist and molecular biologist turned tenured biotech faculty turned bioinformatics scientist turned entrepreneur. My passion is developing instructional materials for 21st century biology (
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and what is the volume of the sea?
This sounds a bit like the beginning of a poem but it's really the answer to the question we posed last week on a Digital Biology Friday.
We can see, in the sequence window, that two strands are both labeled 5' on the left side and 3' on the right. We call this direction "five prime to three prime."
But, when we look in the structure window, we see that the two strands are oriented in the opposite direction relative to each other. The 5' end of one strand is located across from the 3' end of the other strand.
(Note: I added the arrow and labels, this wasn't done by Cn3D).
Naturally, we have a fancy name to describe this orientation. We say that the DNA strands are "antiparallel."
Since I'm feeling a bit antiparallel at the moment, myself, I'll leave to you to explore on your own until next week.
Comments
your work truly facinates me. your work in the field of micro biology is truly interesting. you make learning DNA interesting again. i think i love you. please send more pictures of you i find you very attractive.
Posted by: Jagan | March 28, 2007 10:09 PM