Meet the ribosomes

Ribosomes are molecular machines that build new proteins. This process of synthesizing a protein is also known as translation. Many antibiotics prevent translation by binding to ribosomal RNA. In the class that I'm teaching, we're going to be looking at ribosome structures to see if the polymorphisms that we find in the sequences of 16S ribosomal RNA are related antibiotic resistance. This is related to our metagenomics project where we investigate the polymorphisms we find in 16S ribosomal RNAs. This 6 minute video introduces ribosomes, discusses where they're found, what they're made of, how they're built, and discusses why some parts of the ribosome might be under less selective pressure than others.
Meet the ribosomes from Sandra Porter on Vimeo.