DNA to Protein Toolkit
A lab-mate hands you an unlabeled DNA fragment. Build the toolkit that profiles it, transcribes it, translates it and weighs the protein it encodes.
The brief
A collaborator has sent you a short, unlabeled stretch of DNA from a newly sequenced gene and asked one question: what is it, and what does it make?
To answer, you will follow the central dogma of molecular biology: DNA is transcribed into RNA, and RNA is translated into protein. Across four stages you build the small tools a bioinformatician would write to profile a sequence, convert it, read it as a protein and finally weigh that protein, the number you would compare with an experiment.
WHAT YOU WILL BUILD
A mini sequence toolkit that can describe a DNA fragment (composition and GC content), transcribe it, read its opposite strand, translate an RNA message into a protein and compute that protein's mass.
How a lab works
- Read the stage brief and look at the given input.
- Write code in a notebook that runs on your own computer, using skills from the problem bank.
- Submit your code and explanation. We re-run the code on our server against hidden tests, so the result can be trusted.
- Check your understanding with a few questions (a self-check in your browser) and explain your approach in your own words.
- Finish every stage and the lab is marked completed.
What you'll learn
- Treat a DNA sequence as data you can count, transform and check
- Apply the central dogma (DNA, RNA, protein) as concrete string operations
- Use a dictionary to encode a biological lookup table such as the genetic code
- Turn a short biological question into small, testable functions
Skills from the problem bank
This project builds on techniques practised in these problems. Solving them first is recommended, not required.
- Computing GC Content Foundational
- Counting Nucleotides Foundational
- DNA to RNA Transcription Foundational
- Reverse Complement Foundational
- Translating RNA into Protein Intermediate
- Protein Molecular Weight Intermediate