A strand of mRNA has the bases guanine-adenine-uracil. What amino acid corresponds to these bases?
1 Answer
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:
- search for the first letter in the codon (here: G) in the rows on the left side of the table.
- find the second letter (here: A) in the columns. This narrows the search down to one cell in the table.
- 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).
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).