Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Sense (molecular biology)
Summary
In molecular biology and genetics, the sense of a nucleic acid molecule, particularly of a strand of DNA or RNA, refers to the nature of the roles of the strand and its complement in specifying a sequence of amino acids. Depending on the context, sense may have slightly different meanings. For example, negative-sense strand of DNA is equivalent to the template strand, whereas the positive-sense strand is the non-template strand whose nucleotide sequence is equivalent to the sequence of the mRNA transcript.
Because of the complementary nature of base-pairing between nucleic acid polymers, a double-stranded DNA molecule will be composed of two strands with sequences that are reverse complements of each other. To help molecular biologists specifically identify each strand individually, the two strands are usually differentiated as the "sense" strand and the "antisense" strand. An individual strand of DNA is referred to as positive-sense (also positive (+) or simply sense) if its nucleotide sequence corresponds directly to the sequence of an RNA transcript which is translated or translatable into a sequence of amino acids (provided that any thymine bases in the DNA sequence are replaced with uracil bases in the RNA sequence). The other strand of the double-stranded DNA molecule is referred to as negative-sense (also negative (−) or antisense), and is reverse complementary to both the positive-sense strand and the RNA transcript. It is actually the antisense strand that is used as the template from which RNA polymerases construct the RNA transcript, but the complementary base-pairing by which nucleic acid polymerization occurs means that the sequence of the RNA transcript will look identical to the positive-sense strand, apart from the RNA transcript's use of uracil instead of thymine.
Sometimes the phrases coding strand and template strand are encountered in place of sense and antisense, respectively, and in the context of a double-stranded DNA molecule the usage of these terms is essentially equivalent.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related courses (7)
CH-210: Biochemistry
Les constituants biochimiques de l'organisme, protéines, glucides, lipides, à la lumière de l'évolution des concepts et des progrès en biologie moléculaire et génétique, sont étudiés.
BIOENG-320: Synthetic biology
This advanced Bachelor/Master level course will cover fundamentals and approaches at the interface of biology, chemistry, engineering and computer science for diverse fields of synthetic biology. This
BIOENG-110: General Biology
Le but du cours est de fournir un aperçu général de la biologie des cellules et des organismes. Nous en discuterons dans le contexte de la vie des cellules et des organismes, en mettant l'accent sur l
Related publications (70)
Related people (9)
Related concepts (16)
Morpholino
A Morpholino, also known as a Morpholino oligomer and as a phosphorodiamidate Morpholino oligomer (PMO), is a type of oligomer molecule (colloquially, an oligo) used in molecular biology to modify gene expression. Its molecular structure contains DNA bases attached to a backbone of methylenemorpholine rings linked through phosphorodiamidate groups. Morpholinos block access of other molecules to small (~25 base) specific sequences of the base-pairing surfaces of ribonucleic acid (RNA).
Virus
A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Since Dmitri Ivanovsky's 1892 article describing a non-bacterial pathogen infecting tobacco plants and the discovery of the tobacco mosaic virus by Martinus Beijerinck in 1898, more than 11,000 of the millions of virus species have been described in detail.
Reading frame
In molecular biology, a reading frame is a way of dividing the sequence of nucleotides in a nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) molecule into a set of consecutive, non-overlapping triplets. Where these triplets equate to amino acids or stop signals during translation, they are called codons. A single strand of a nucleic acid molecule has a phosphoryl end, called the 5′-end, and a hydroxyl or 3′-end. These define the 5′→3′ direction. There are three reading frames that can be read in this 5′→3′ direction, each beginning from a different nucleotide in a triplet.