RNA are much larger than Proteins
But we don’t have to get into such details in order to see how “off” our perceptions are. I, and probably many others, have a mental picture of an mRNA sequence being read out and transcribed into a larger protein, but that can’t be right. And it isn’t! In reality, the mRNAs are ~10x the size of proteins themselves. This feels wrong to us, because we’re used to our own preferences for algorithmic compression: blueprints are smaller than houses, but not inside the cell.