Unintuitive RNA

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.

Leave a comment