Question

Which of the following is the Pribnow box?
A. 5’- TATAAT – 3’
B. 5’- TAATAT – 3’
C. 5’- AATAAT – 3’
D. 5’- ATATTA – 3’

Answer 1

Hint: The central dogma forms the most important metabolism of our body. In this, the information of genes flows into proteins via the cascade- DNA to RNA to protein. There are different enzymes used in this whole process, DNA polymerase, Rna polymerase and Reverse transcriptase are the most important enzymes.

Complete answer:
The Pribnow box is also called the Pribnow Schaller box. It is a sequence of 6 nucleotides. It is a promoter site’s part on DNA for transcription. The nucleotides are formed of purines and pyrimidines like thymine, adenine, thymine etc.
It has almost the same function as the TATA box in the eukaryotes. It is a consensus sequence- the most frequently occurring and repeating sequences. They remain constant in all the specified organisms.
The Pribnow box is the -10 sequence because it is placed approximately ten base pairs upstream from the site of the initiation in transcription.
Transcription is one of the steps in gene expression. In this, the DNA is copied into mRNA by the RNA polymerase. To start the transcription, they need an initiation site.
Around the initiation site, there is a promoter site on which the promoter binds to enhance the transcription. A promoter is a sequence of DNA to which protein will bind to enhance transcription of DNA.
The Pribnow sequence is 5’- TATAAT – 3’, which forms the option A.

So the answer is option A: 5’- TATAAT -3’.

Note: The Pribnow box is a constant sequence of nucleotides in prokaryotes. There is a predominance of adenine and thymine bases. This states that the hydrogen bonding between two strands of DNA is very weak. This will enable the strands to separate easily. So the Transcription by RNA polymerase to convert DNA to RNA also becomes very easy.