A strand of mRNA has the bases guanine-adenine-uracil. What amino acid corresponds to these bases?

1 Answer
Joëlle
Aug 21, 2016

Aspartic acid or aspartate.

Explanation:

The mRNA codons can be looked up in a table to find the amino acid it corresponds to (see image below).

Steps to find the correct amino acid:

  1. search for the first letter in the codon (here: G) in the rows on the left side of the table.
  2. find the second letter (here: A) in the columns. This narrows the search down to one cell in the table.
  3. find the third letter (here: U) on the right side of the table to find the codon (here: GAU). Next to this codon you find the abbreviation of the amino acid (here: Asp).

http://biology.kenyon.edu/courses/biol114/Chap05/Chapter05.html

So in this case your mRNA codon is GAU (guanine-adenine-uracil) which corresponds to the amino acid abbreviated with Asp. This is aspartic acid also called apartate (see image below).

http://dgbiochem.blogspot.nl/2014/11/amino-acids-structure-and-nomenclature.html

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