Some Hidden Messages are More Surprising than Others
Get introduced to reverse complement and pattern matching in this lesson.
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Recall that nucleotides A and T are complements of each other, as are C and G. Having one strand of DNA and a supply of “free floating” nucleotides as shown in figure below, one can imagine the synthesis of a complementary strand on a template strand. This model of replication was confirmed by Meselson and Stahl in 1958 (see DETOUR: The Most Beautiful Experiment in Biology). The figure below shows a template strand AGTCGCATAGT and its complementary strand ACTATGCGACT.
At this point, you may think that we have made a mistake since the complementary strand in the above figure reads out TCAGCGTATCA from left to right rather than ACTATGCGACT. We haven’t: each DNA strand has a direction, and the complementary strand runs in the opposite direction to the template strand, as shown by the arrows in above figure. Each strand is read in the 5 → 3 ...