Lesson: The Genetic Code Biology

In this lesson, we will learn how to describe the nature of the genetic code and recall how information is transferred from DNA to protein.

Lesson Plan

Students will be able to

recall that information is transferred from DNA to mRNA to protein by transcription and translation,
recognize the purpose of codons and derive a sequence of amino acids from given codons,
describe the nature of the genetic code as being nonoverlapping, degenerate, and universal.

Lesson Presentation

Lesson Video

Lesson Explainer

Lesson Worksheet

Q1:

Which of the following correctly describes the features of the genetic code?

Q2:

In a sequence of RNA, 3 bases code for an amino acid. There are 64 possible combinations. However, there are only 20 standard amino acids in humans. What does this suggest?

Q3:

The genetic code is considered universal; what does this mean?