Question

1. What would be the effect of treating cells with an agent that removed the cap from mRNAs?

2.Why are introns considered insignificant? What do current researches suggest about their possible contribution to organisms?

Answer 1

1.

• The cells would die.
• Because the cells cannot synthesise any proteins in the absence of cap.
• Cap generally protects mRNA from degradation by hydrolytic enzymes .
• Cap also promotes the attachment to ribosome.

2.Introns are insignificant because:

• They are non coding regions.
• They do not code any proteins.
• point mutation inside introns may leads to defective splicing.
• Hence it is of no use even in the case of regulatory sequence and alternative proteins.

Recent researchers suggest that:

• Introns perform the process of regulation the gene expression.
• Introns helps in faster evolution of unique cells with different amount of protein.