I have no idea where to place this information, so I’m throwing it in a mini article. Just a quick aside about the doodles in these articles.  Yes I do them all myself, No I’ve never done anything like it before, and yes they take an embarrassingly long amount of time.  I do them because they’re fun. 

The reason I mention the doodles is because I have now acknowledged the fact that they can be misleading to some.  I throw little eyeballs and arms on these molecules because I think it’s a fun way to envision what’s happening here. This is how my brain saw these things in my earliest classes. I see now that animating these things can also inadvertently diminish their awesomeness.  The awesomeness is derived from the fact that the complexity of biology, life itself, is dictated by the fundamental sciences of chemistry and physics. 

Don’t lose sight of the fact that none of these biological molecules are actually sentient, they are just machines doing what they are supposed to do. They are strings of chemical compounds that react to other chemical compounds in preordained and predictable ways. Highly organized and complex strings, but strings nonetheless. RNA polymerase and ribosomes, they don’t do their jobs because they want to, they do their jobs because they are forced to by chemistry and the laws of physics.  A tRNA isn’t activity looking it’s designated codon.  It’s just randomly floating around with it’s amino acid in tow, unguided.  When it’s anticodon sequence comes into proximity to it’s target codon, a chemical attraction pulls it in.  The ribosome then recognizes and validates it’s presence, shifts the amino acid payload from the tRNA to the previous amino acid by shifting some chemicals around, advances the mRNA by one codon, and jettisons the now empty tRNA. Rinse and repeat.  It’s all just chemicals pushing and pulling on either, completely autonomously.

Just remember, all we are is a tenderly balanced, insanely complex and poorly understood assortment of chemical compounds with sentience.  If we as a species could understand if or how the former contrives the later…I’m just waxing philosophical now. You get my point.  

No, your tRNAs do not have eyeballs.