Ribosomes – The Lego Builders!
Proteins are a chemical that we use to make the body work – they are involved in the making of something called an enzyme. Enzymes make body processes go faster – like how you would eat food so you could run instead of walk. We can get these proteins from food – the best place to find a protein is in meats like pork and beef, or in eggs and nuts. But we also have something in the body that makes proteins called a ribosome.
Ribosomes are called protein synthesizers, or protein builders. Ribosomes can be found floating around in a cell, or they can be attached to the ER – the Endoplasmic Reticulum. The ER is just folded up sacs or tubes outside of the nucleus, or center, of the cell.
But how does all of this work? If you need a protein, how is it made? And what does a ribosome have to do with it?
Here’s where it starts to get interesting. In order for the ribosome to help put the proteins together, you first need to have something called mRNA. mRNA is like your DNA, the thing that makes your eyes and hair a certain color, that can tell you how tall you are going to be or if you’ll write with your left hand or your right. mRNA is a copy of your DNA that got made by the nucleus, the center part of every cell. The nucleus is like a computer and the DNA is instructions on the computer. In the DNA is instructions for how to make proteins, and once that is copied and sent out of the nucleus, it becomes mRNA.
Like a computer with an email, the nucleus sends the mRNA – and thereby the instructions to make a protein – to the ribosomes. Here’s where the ribosomes become builders!
You are a ribosome, and the nucleus, your teacher, just gave you a sheet of paper showing you how to make a house out of the legos. The sheet of paper is your mRNA, and you use that to make the house of legos, which is your protein. You can’t start making the house of legos until your teacher hands out all the instructions, but once that’s done you can make your lego house. But making a lego house is a little simpler than making a protein.
Your legos are now something called an amino acid. Amino acids are the “building blocks” of a full protein – the legos that make up your full house. Amino acids are different, just like legos are. Some of them are different sizes and shapes, meaning they can’t always fit together. In this case, let’s pretend that only legos of certain colors can go together to make the right kind of house. You must use the mRNA, your instruction sheet, to find out which color of lego goes with another color. You can put yellow legos with blue legos, but not with red legos, and so on.
But there’s another kind of RNA in that your teacher has. This RNA is called transfer RNA, or tRNA. tRNA is what keeps your amino acids in order in your cell. For this example, the tRNA is the bucket that all of your legos are in. You, as the ribosome, have to take your instructions, the mRNA, and go to the lego bucket to pick out all the legos – or amino acids – that you need to make your protein house. Once you’ve gotten your instructions from your teacher, looked over all them to find out how to build and what you need to get, gone to the bucket to retrieve the right number of pieces that you need for building, and returned, you can finally build your protein house! Once you’ve finished your protein house, you can connect it with the protein house someone else made, and then keep adding protein houses in a long chain until you’ve finally made your full protein.
It takes a lot of pieces and working parts to make a protein with a ribosome, but the end product is a working protein that your body uses to function. Even one little ribosome can make a big difference in your body.
