Edmund Scientific is selling a T-shirt with a picture of a replicating DNA molecule [DNA is Life T-Shirt].
The caption reads "DNA Is Life. THE REST IS JUST DETAILS." Clever, but sometimes those details are important.
Look closely at the T-shirt. How many of you recognize what's wrong with the molecule on the T-shirt? It may be "just a detail" but I wonder why they couldn't have designed a logo that was scientifically accurate?
How difficult can it be? Would they sell fewer T-shirts if the molecule was accurately depicted?
[Hat Tip: Hsien-Hsien Lei]
8 comments :
It only has a backbone (deoxyribose and phosphate) for quite a bit of the molecule. Where did the A, C, G and T go? By the way, when the t-shirt folds like that it looks like it says "The rest is just the devils."
Yeah, missing some bases there. Also no Okazaki action, so not antiparallel...jeez.
And those "details"...like, phenotypes? organisms?
I can't blow it up big enough to tell for sure, but it seems to suggest that the 2 strands are covalently linked (with a single entity - base?? - in the middle), rather than being held together by hydrogen bonds between a pair of bases.
Oh, and what Sven said about leading / lagging strand synthesis.
To me, it looks as if they have incorrectly depicted the DNA molecule as a left-handed helix (which only forms under special conditions). B-DNA, which is the predominant physiological form of DNA, is a right-handed helix.
Further to what bing said, one of the daughter helices is right handed and the other is left handed. You can't have it both ways ;-)
Here the answer: see the 2nd half of this video, as it illustrates the process that is not occuring on the t-shirt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj9cdVeIntY
- divalent
dna is a detail
in biology, you have to pay good attention to ALL details.
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