
Figure 1. The elongation of a pre-mRNA by RNAP as it moves down the template strand of DNA.

Figure 2. RNA is identical to the coding strand except for the replacement of thymine with uracil.
In “Transcribing DNA into RNA”, we mentioned that a strand of DNA is copied into a strand of RNA
during transcription, but we neglected to mention how transcription is achieved.
In the nucleus, an enzyme (i.e., a molecule that accelerates a chemical reaction)
called RNA polymerase (RNAP) initiates transcription
by breaking the bonds joining complementary bases of DNA. It then
creates a molecule called precursor mRNA, or pre-mRNA, by using one of the two strands of DNA as a template strand: moving
down the template strand, when RNAP encounters the next nucleotide, it adds the complementary base
to the growing RNA strand, with the provision that uracil must be used in place of thymine; see
Figure 1.
Because RNA is constructed based on complementarity, the second strand of DNA,
called the coding strand, is identical to the new strand of RNA except for the
replacement of thymine with uracil. See Figure 2
and recall “Transcribing DNA into RNA”.
After RNAP has created several nucleotides of RNA, the first separated complementary DNA bases then
bond back together. The overall effect is very similar to a pair of zippers traversing the DNA
double helix, unzipping the two strands and then quickly zipping them back together while
the strand of pre-mRNA is produced.
For that matter, it is not the case that an entire substring of DNA is transcribed into RNA and then
translated into a peptide one codon at a time.
In reality, a pre-mRNA is first chopped into smaller segments
called introns and exons; for the purposes of
protein translation, the introns are thrown out, and the exons are
glued together sequentially to produce a final strand of mRNA.
This cutting and pasting process is called splicing, and it is facilitated by
a collection of RNA and proteins called a spliceosome. The fact that the spliceosome is
made of RNA and proteins despite regulating the splicing of RNA to create proteins is
just one manifestation of a molecular chicken-and-egg scenario that has yet to be fully resolved.
In terms of DNA, the exons deriving from a gene are collectively known as the gene's coding region.