Into the Strenuous Briefness

Sometimes I “overshoot” with my gifted kids.

I’m suddenly worried that this case study I have spent a week adapting is going to be one of those times.

Last year when I taught transcription and translation I introduced mRNA processing (splicing and modification) and I also introduced reading frames. This year I’m keeping all of that and adding directionality (i.e., I am making them consider the whole “5’—>3’” thing) plus identifying coding regions in the original DNA given the amino acid sequence.

By themselves, transcription and translation are not terribly difficult to grasp. And my reason for including more detail this year is to enable them to engage with more authentic examples—in this case, IDing the difference between viral strains by analyzing sequence in the same way a researcher would. I think it’s a worthwhile trade-off. 

I just hope I am writing this clearly enough, and that the introductory lecture notes will be clear enough, and that the transcription/translation modeling task will be demonstrative enough.

This is my favorite content, so it’s tough to hold back.