Lecture, chapters 9 and 10 - From genes to proteins, and from proteins to phenotypes

Today we finished chapter 9, on how genetic information is used to synthesize proteins, and started chapter 10, on how proteins are, or influence, the phenotype.

We talked about the possibilities of changing a polypeptide after it has been synthesized, thus accounting fopr the more than 100,000 enzymes in the human organism, which has just about 25,000 genes in its genome. We defined the difference between a polypeptide and a protein (hint: every protein is a polypeptide or a group of polypeptides, but not every polypeptide is a protein).
Then we talked about the levels of structure that proteins can have: Primary, secondary, tertiary, and, in some cases, quaternary. We finished the chapter by discussing some of the consequences of a mutation that alters the amino acid sequence of a protein.

We also started chapter 10, and discussed how certain mutations in the sequence of amino acids of enzymes and receptor proteins affect the phenotype of the person who bearing them.

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