Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe the structure of nucleic acids and define the two types of nucleic acidsExplain the structure and role of DNAExplain the structure and roles of RNA

As a class, students work through an example showing how DNA provides the "recipe" for making our body proteins. They see how the pattern of nucleotide bases (adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine) forms the double helix ladder shape of DNA, and serves as the code for the steps required to make genes. They also learn some ways that engineers and scientists are applying their understanding of DNA in our world.

Explore the relationship between the genetic code on the DNA strand and the resulting protein and rudimentary shape it forms. Through models of transcription and translation, you will discover this relationship and the resilience to mutations built into our genetic code. Start by exploring DNA's double helix with an interactive 3D model. Highlight base pairs, look at one or both strands, and turn hydrogen bonds on or off. Next, watch an animation of transcription, which creates RNA from DNA, and translation, which 'reads' the RNA codons to create a protein.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The translation of messenger RNA, or mRNA, is fundamental to eukaryotic life as we know it. So when mRNA is mistranslated, abnormalities like cancer can arise. That has cancer researchers targeting proteins called eukaryotic initiation factors, or eIFs. eIFs regulate the early stages of translation known as initiation. Research shows that in mammals, eIFs themselves are regulated by a protein complex known as mTORC1. mTORC1 helps stimulate protein production, which in cancer translates to tumor proliferation and survival. Together, eIFs and mTORC1 recruit an array of signaling pathways that serve as the machinery for cancer growth. Researchers are currently developing several ways of stopping that machinery in the fight against cancer, such as phosphorylating the protein eIF2α to induce cancer cell death or inhibiting the protein eIF4A using known small-molecule compounds. Over the past two decades, researchers have made much progress in identifying drugs that target eIFs..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This course discusses the principles of genetics with application to the study of biological function at the level of molecules, cells, and multicellular organisms, including humans. The topics include: structure and function of genes, chromosomes and genomes, biological variation resulting from recombination, mutation, and selection, population genetics, use of genetic methods to analyze protein function, gene regulation and inherited disease.

You’ve probably heard of mRNA, thanks to the COVID-19 vaccine. But what is mRNA exactly? In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we learn about the role of messenger RNA in living things and how it decodes our DNA instruction manual through transcription.
Chapters:
Introduction: mRNA Vaccines
Messenger RNA
Transcription
Processing & Splicing
The Central Dogma
Alternative Splicing
Review & Credits
Credits