DNA Building Model 

  1. The nucleotides in DNA have either purines or pyramidines nitrogenous bases. These nucleotides bond with each others, sugar to phosphate head. The bases bond together with complimentary base pairing. The nitrogenous bases bond with opposite bases. (Purines with Pyraminides), therefore the strands are antiparallel. This means that the strands are facing opposite sides.
  2. This activitie help to model the structure of DNA because it allows us to show and build every step to create our DNA. We created the first strand and placed our nitrogenous baseson the strand to create what was in our first image. This model also allowed us to show how complimentary base pairing bonds the certain bases together with each other. To improve this model, I beleive it would be beneficiat to increase the length of the DNA since the strands of DNA are not only a dozen nucleotides long. Strands of DNA are much longer, an therefore it would improve the model if it was longer.

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DNA Replication Model

  1. DNA replication occurs when cell divisions is about to take place. DNA replication is semi-conservative because it only uses one original backbone for each replicated DNA.

Step 1 :  The helicase comes and unwinds the DNA strand into the two bakcbones.

Step 2 : The DNA polymerase takes nucleotides, then comes and attaches the nulecotides to the backbone through complimentary base paring.

Step 3 : The final step is for the Ligase to come and finalizes the strand. The Ligase takes the strand and finalizes it by connecting all the new nucleotides together.

3. This model was able to show the complimentary base pairing with the white pipe cleaners joining together in the middle of the DNA strand. I believe this as a greate way to model the complimentary base pairing and having specific nucleotides pairing together. I don’t believe the modeling of the replication process was very well done by this model because the model did not show the lagging strand and how the ligase needs to spend more time putting the new DNA together on the side with the lagging strand. In addition to this, the DNA was not modelled to be long enough which is more of an accuracy problem, though it does not have a great affect on the learning process like the laggin strand does.

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