Question

3. Briefly describe the importance of accurate splicing. What happens if too much RNA is removed during splicing? What happens if not enough RNA is removed during splicing? What would happen if a splicing event results in the deletion of a single nucleotide from the beginning of an exon? (4 points)

Answer 1

3. Splicing is a very important function in central dogma of eukaryotes. Splicing enables an extra regulatory procedure for mature transcript, by alternative splicing eukaryotes can synthesize various type of protein from a single DNA molecule. The part of pre m- RNA that remains for protein synthesis called exon and spliced out part called introns.

Splicing have to be very accurate, as some of introns are responsible for the regulatory procedure for final protein product of central dogma. It needs to very accurate because if it wrongly spliced then the final product can be non-functional, mutated or can be with deformed structure due to wrongly fold.

If too much RNA is removed during splicing then the final product will be with shorter amino acid sequence which leads to a non-functional protein. It can be lethal or harmful for body.

If enough RNA is not removed then also the protein will become mutated or wrongly fold, if intron has a stop signal then peptide chain will be shorter, and protein will become non-functional.

If splicing event results in the deletion of a single nucleotide from the beginning of an exon then we can see a frame shift mutation in mature transcript that would yield a totally different kind of peptide chain than the wild type protein, due to frameshift mutation a stop signal can also be generated. Which leads to a shorter polypeptide.