Sources
This activity was put together from the bright ideas of several great teachers: Lori Lambertson of the Exploratorium Teacher Institute and Jim Youngblom of CSU Stanislaus.
Standards
Grade 8
Chemistry of Living Systems (Life Sciences)
6. Principles of chemistry underlie the functioning of biological systems. As a basis for understanding this concept:
c. Students know that living organisms have many different kinds of molecules, including small ones, such as water and salt, and very large ones, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and DNA.
Grade 9-12
Genetics
4. Genes are a set of instructions encoded in the DNA sequence of each organism that specify the sequence of amino acids in proteins characteristic of that organism. As a basis for understanding this concept:
a. Students know the general pathway by which ribosomes synthesize proteins, using tRNAs to translate genetic information in mRNA.
b. Students know how to apply the genetic coding rules to predict the sequence of amino acids from a sequence of codons in RNA.
e. Students know proteins can differ from one another in the number and sequence of amino acids.