{"id":224,"date":"2014-12-21T09:29:45","date_gmt":"2014-12-21T16:29:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thinkbio.guru\/tBioWordPress\/?p=224"},"modified":"2026-08-20T10:13:36","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T14:13:36","slug":"whats-important-concepts-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkbio.guru\/tBioWordPress\/2014\/12\/whats-important-concepts-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s important about… Concepts in Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Teaching biology at the cell\/molecular level is challenging; as the Bob Seger song puts it ‘Deadlines and commitments\/what to leave in… what to leave out.”\u00a0How to decide? The glib answer is “identify the key concepts.” A definition of these might\u00a0be “what are the aspects and ideas without which the process would not make sense, and which, if changed, would rock the cell’s world.” So… what are the Big Concepts\u00a0of translation? Starting with negation, these cannot be the names or even the structures of the twenty amino acids \u00a0(believed to be a combination of what was on hand in abundance ‘in the beginning’ and ‘discoveries’ \u00a0that were biochemically accessible) nor their codon assignments, which, may<\/em> reflect some physical correspondences, but seem to largely be a\u00a0‘frozen accident’ that we should not expect to find elsewhere. Rant<\/span>: it cannot be the ability to ‘translate’ a message in a codons-to-amino-acids look-up table, as this has nothing whatever to do with the biological process! And the core cannot be a laundry list of actors and factors.<\/p>\n

The big concepts in translation…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

have to do with the processes by which\u00a0living systems\u00a0to convert from a language involving self-partnering chemicals–the bases<\/a><\/strong>—\u00a0ideal for copying and dispensing ‘instructions’, to one that constitutes a wondrous diversity of building blocks–the amino acids<\/span>— from which virtually any cellular machine can be made..<\/p>\n

\"View<\/a>
Conceptual view of a ribosome with tRNAs in P(eptidyl) and A(mino) sites<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An attempt to represent a conceptual overview of translation is thinkBio’s Info Flow (Protein)<\/a><\/p>\n

So herein lies the rub: we have two fantastic collections for their roles, one ‘informational’ and one action-based (pieces for building machines). Somehow, we have to get the instructions to instruct the assembly of the actors. Translation (going from \u2018nucleotide language\u2019 to \u2018amino acid language\u2019) is perhaps one of the most astounding and hardest to view as having evolved. Can we identify the root concepts in translation\u00a0? My version:<\/p>\n