DNA and RNA Trivia

1. Drosophila mutants deficient in one gene display a rather odd phenotype (observable characteristic) which has led quirky fruit fly scientists to name it 'Groucho'. What phenotype is expressed by these mutants?

From Quiz Nutty as a Fruit Fly

Answer: A large amount of facial bristles

Groucho is named for Groucho Marx, as a fly which lacks this gene often displays large bristles of sensory 'hair' on its face, similar to the famous comedian. Groucho encodes a protein which functions as an important repressor of several other genes during development and adulthood.

From Quiz DNA Trivia

Answer: Deoxyribonucleic Acid

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is the chemical term for this molecule. Interestingly, here in the UK this was one of the higher questions on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" (if I remember correctly it was £64,000). As a biologist you can imagine I was jumping up and down in the living room, much to my parents' annoyance!

From Quiz Discovering DNA and RNA

Answer: primase

Primase it the enzyme that creates a short RNA primer sequence so that DNA polymerase 3 can bind to the primer and link the adjacent nucleotides together. Ligase is the enzyme that links the okazaki fragments together. Restriction enzymes are used to cut DNA in DNA recombination.

From Quiz RNA Basics

Answer: Ribonucleic Acid

Ribonucleic acid is abbreviated RNA, just as deoxyribonucleic acid is DNA.

From Quiz Structure of DNA

Answer: Two spirals, like a twisty ladder

The double helix shape of DNA is two spirals, resembling a twisted ladder, or two spring coiled together.

From Quiz DNA Replication

Answer: A always pairs with T and C always pairs with G

This complementary base pairing is the basis of DNA replication. This ensures that both of the strands of DNA have exactly the same message contained in them. In fact when Watson and Crick first built their model of the structure of DNA, this relationship was so striking that it immediately showed them how DNA would replicate itself!

From Quiz More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About DNA

Answer: Deoxyribonucleic acid

DNA stands for 'deoxyribonucleic acid', clearly a term invented by chemists who dislike the English language. Break it apart and it gets less scary: 'Nucleic' means it was first found in the nucleus of cells. 'Acid' refers to the chemical properties of the molecule. And 'deoxyribo' comes from the sugar that forms part of DNA's backbone, deoxyribose. So, if you put it all together, the name is basically chemists carefully describing what the molecule is made of, piece by piece, like someone coming up with a term that includes every ingredient to describe a very complicated sandwich. For example, to unnecessarily belabor the point, a chemist might describe a bacon cheeseburger on a sesame seed bun as a porcocaseobubulactuca-sesamopan. The molecule itself is the famous double helix, discovered in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick, with crucial work from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. Make a flexible ladder. Twist it. That's a double helix. The 'vertical' rails of the ladder are made of repeating sugar and phosphate units, and the rungs are pairs of nitrogen bases that store genetic information. Your body has about 37 trillion cells, and almost every one of them contains a full copy of your DNA. If you stretched all the DNA in your body end to end, you'd die. BUT to finish the point, those who survived you would be able to run that stretched-out DNA from your estate to the Sun and back many times. Okay, fine, there are many flaws in that plan, but you get the idea.

From Quiz Bodily Defences Against Cancer

Answer: Mismatch repair

Mismatch repair is performed primarily by two proteins - MSH2 and MLH1. MSH2 scans the DNA for mismatches - e.g. when A is paired with C or when G is paired with T. MLH1 then scans for the nearest nick in the DNA (which is indicative of newly synthesised DNA). Once the mismatch and the nick have been detected, the DNA in between these two sites is degraded and DNA polymerase can have another go at replicating the DNA correctly. Mutations affecting this repair mechanism lead to increased levels of mutation elsewhere and are seen in several cancers, in particular in the colon.

From Quiz Great DNA Experiments

Answer: Transformation

Griffith's experiment used two strains of bacteria - a dead virulent strain and a live non-virulent strain - and showed that a mixture of the two was capable of killing mice. This suggested that there was something which causes bacteria to be virulent which was transferred from the dead strain to the live strain, making the live strain virulent also. The work was built upon by Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty. This was the first method of gene transfer identified. The two other main methods of gene acquisition by bacteria are conjugation (directly from other bacteria) and transduction (from viruses). Both of the latter mechanisms were discovered by Joshua Lederberg.

From Quiz DNA Trivia

Answer: Pus

Work on finding the 'molecule of life' involved a massive convergence of medical knowledge, chemistry, virology and biology. It was Swiss Physician Friedrich Miescher who observed small structures in the pus (Leukocytes) in discarded bandages. He called this nuclein, as it was isolated in the nuclei of the cells, today better known as heterochromatin. Miescher in fact characterised it chemically as a novel molecule which probably had a role in cell division, that was not a known protein.

From Quiz A New You In 30 Minutes

Answer: The replication fork

Quite simply, this structure is named for its shape - the molecule "forks" into two separated strands, each capable of acting as a template for free nucleotides. The replication fork constantly moves due to the action of helicase.

From Quiz Nucleic Acid Extraction Methods

Answer: Hydrophilic property

Due to their hydrophilic properties (which means a high affinity for water), nucleic acids get adsorbed onto the solid phase matrix while proteins, lipids and other contaminants, which are hydrophobic (which means not easily adsorbed by water), continue through the column.

From Quiz Discovering DNA and RNA

Answer: RNA contains a single phosphate group

RNA is single stranded while DNA is double stranded. DNA's double stranded nature gives it the double helix structure.

From Quiz Reading the Double Helix: DNA Transcription

Answer: sigma

RNA polymerase slides loosely along the template DNA while the sigma subunit searches for promoter sequences by forming transient hydrogen bonds with the DNA base pairs. The RNA polymerase does NOT engage in a trial-and-error form of search where it repeatedly binds with DNA until it finds a promoter site. This explains the extremely high rate constant for RNA polymerase binding to promoter sites (10^10 M^-1 s^-1). Different types of sigma subunits can recognize different promoter sequences, so the sigma subunit plays a large role in determining where RNA polymerase begins transcription.

From Quiz RNA Basics

Answer: Uracil

In DNA, adenine bonds to thymine, but in RNA, adenine bonds to uracil. Thymine is not found in RNA. Guanine and cytosine always bond to each other in DNA and RNA.

From Quiz Structure of DNA

Answer: Nucleotides

A nucleotide consists of a nitrogen base, a sugar, and a phosphate.

From Quiz Building Blocks of Life: DNA, RNA, and Protein

Answer: Hydrogen bonds

Hydrogen bonding between bases allows for stabilization of the double helix. It is important because while these bonds are strong enough to hold the helix shape, they can also be broken under appropriate conditions in order to allow for the two strands which make up the helix to separate for replication or transcription.

From Quiz DNA Replication

Answer: Unwinding of parental DNA

First the DNA is unwound partly then synthesis of the leading and lagging strands occurs simultaneously, although the leading strand is quicker (hence the names). Sealing of the nicks is what occurs as part of replication of the lagging strand, because this strand runs in the opposite direction to DNA synthesis so must be generated in short sections as the DNA unwinds.

From Quiz Nutty as a Fruit Fly

Answer: Strabismus

The lack of a strabismus gene may lead to poorly developed ommatidium, the structures which make up compound eyes in insects. Strabismus is also important in establishing cell polarity in Drosophila wings, ensuring that each hair points away from the body, rather than towards it.

From Quiz DNA Cloning

Answer: Plasmids (circular sections of DNA)

In 1973 Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen did the first major recombinant/cloned DNA experiments. E. coli bacteria have their genomic DNA, which is what we can think of as the basic DNA blueprint for E. coli. They also have DNA plasmids which carry non-essential genes that it has picked up over time. Tetracycline and Kanamycin (antibiotic) resistance is carried on these plasmids. Boyer and Cohen decided to use DNA cloning technology to merge the two resistances together into a single plasmid which granted resistance to both classes of antibiotics. This was done through the process described in the next couple questions.

From Quiz Reading the Double Helix: DNA Transcription

Answer: negative supercoil

A negative supercoil essentially "spring-loads" double-helical DNA for unwinding. Right and left-handed supercoils simply determine the overall shape of the DNA molecule. For circular, negatively supercoiled DNA, a left-handed supercoil creates a toroidal shape (donut) while a right-handed supercoil creates a twisting closed-loop double helix (on top of the double helix of the two stands of DNA). Interestingly, the gene that codes for the enzyme that is responsible for introducing negative supercoils to DNA - topoisomerase II - is actually down-regulated by negatively supercoiled DNA. This is a nice feedback inhibition mechanism to ensure that DNA does not become overly negatively supercoiled.

From Quiz Doubling the Double Helix: DNA Replication

Answer: deoxynucleoside triphosphates

It's *DNA* polymerase, so obviously it's going to want to work with deoxynucleosides (nucleosides with deoxyribose instead of ribose). Although the nucleotides found in DNA are deoxynucleoside monophosphates, DNA polymerase III requires deoxynucleoside triphosphates (dNTPs). Why? Well, answer the next question to find out...

From Quiz Double Helix: DNA

Answer: to maximize hydrophobic interactions between adjacent base pairs

While all the nitrogenous bases found in DNA contain polar functional groups that make the bases soluble in water, the skeletal ring structures of the bases are largely non-polar and hydrophobic. If DNA were kept unwound, there would be sufficient empty space between adjacent base-pairs for water to fill, which is thermodynamically unfavorable since hydrophobic substances want to stay away from water. Therefore, by twisting DNA into a double-helix, the space between adjacent base-pairs is minimized and water gets "squeezed out". If you can't see why twisting DNA moves the base-pairs closer to one another, you can try it out yourself using crude models - it really does work!

From Quiz RNA Basics

Answer: Switzerland

Miescher was born in Basel, and worked primarily at the University of Tubingen in Germany, where he made his breakthrough.

From Quiz Structure of DNA

Answer: Thymine

Adenine and thymine always bond together, just as cytosine and guanine always bond together.

From Quiz Building Blocks of Life: DNA, RNA, and Protein

Answer: Semiconservative

In DNA replication one "parental" DNA molecule generates two "daughter" DNA molecules. In semiconservative replication, each daughter DNA molecule contains one "old" strand from the parent and one "new" strand generated with free nucleotides using the enzyme DNA polymerase. The new DNA molecule is therefore the identical base sequence as the parent, using one parental strand as the template to generate a complementary new strand, and thus a new DNA molecule. This process was proved through an experiment by scientists Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl in 1958.

From Quiz DNA Replication

Answer: Semi-conservative replication

It is known as semi-conservative because each daughter molecule of DNA has one old and one new strand of DNA. This allows the genetic code to be copied across intact to the new DNA molecules. If it were conservative, then one daughter molecule would have both old strands and the other would have both new strands. Dispersive replication would be where each strand of DNA would have sections of old and new DNA interspersed along its length. Neither of these models would allow for accurate copying of the genetic material. Disparative replication is something I just made up.

From Quiz Nutty as a Fruit Fly

Answer: A longer than average lifespan

This line is spoken by a man who is taken to the cart of the Dead Collector in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". Living in a village suffering from the plague, the Dead Collector is asked to "wait around" as the man won't be alive for much longer. Fruit flies with mutations in the Indy gene have been observed to live up to twice as long as those with fully functioning Indy genes.

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Last Updated Mar 28 2026 5:50 AM

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