mRNA Technology

Subject: Science & Tech

Section: Biotechnology

Context- Researchers are exploring new approaches, including the mRNA technology.

Concept-

Messenger RNA (mRNA) is a single-stranded RNA molecule that is complementary to one of the DNA strands of a gene.
The mRNA is an RNA version of the gene that leaves the cell nucleus and moves to the cytoplasm where proteins are made.
During protein synthesis, an organelle called a ribosome moves along the mRNA, reads its base sequence, and uses the genetic code to translate each three-base triplet, or codon, into its corresponding amino acid.
Messenger RNAs, also known as mRNA, are one of the types of RNA that are found in the cell.
This particular one, like most RNAs, are made in the nucleus and then exported to the cytoplasm where the translation machinery, the machinery that actually makes proteins, binds to these mRNA molecules and reads the code on the mRNA to make a specific protein.
So in general, the DNA instruction , can be transcribed into an mRNA molecule that will end up making one specific protein.

What are mRNA vaccines?

mRNA vaccines trick the body into producing some of the viral proteins itself.
They work by using mRNA, or messenger RNA, which is the molecule that essentially puts DNA instructions into action.
Inside a cell, mRNA is used as a template to build a protein.

How it works?

To produce an mRNA vaccine, scientists produce a synthetic version of the mRNA that a virus uses to build its infectious proteins.
This mRNA is delivered into the human body, whose cells read it as instructions to build that viral protein, and therefore create some of the virus’s molecules themselves.
These proteins are solitary, so they do not assemble to form a virus.
The immune system then detects these viral proteins and starts to produce a defensive response to them.