Jelly bean necklace

In science class, we made a necklace of jelly beans that said a certain message when each color was assigned an amino acid. You can see the necklace I made on the bottom of the post. In class on Thursday, I translated this DNA strand to RNA, then translated it into amino acids. I took the first latter of the amino acids and found the secret message encoded into the DNA strand.

This translated into "Pigs sit still till mama has ham".

After turning it into RNA, I turned it into amino acids using this wheel.

Then I took the first letter of each amino acid and used it to decipher the code. When making the necklace, one jelly bean was one amino acid. Orange was phenylalanine, green was isoleucine, white was glutamine, brown was serine, purple was tryptophan, black was leucine, red was methionine, yellow was alanine, the big orange jelly beans were histidine, and the pink ones (used as a space) was a stop codon.

I had a lot of fun turning letters into a jelly bean necklace. Even though it was incredibly hard and annoying to string many jellybeans onto a tiny thread, the whole thing was fun! I see how hard of a job RNA has, because keeping track of every letter and different colored jelly beans was very hard, and I only got the message right by going back over and triple checking my work. RNA, though, can only do it once so I am amazed about its accuracy given that any mistake does cause a mutation and could cause cancer.

Oh yeah. Here's the pics of my necklace and me with the extra credit jelly beans.