How is genetic information read from mRNA?
The mRNA contains the ‘genetic code’, which consists of triplet codons that are complementary to the anticodon loop of various tRNAs that have amino acids attached. mRNA is threaded through the ribosome, the tRNA matching a given codon comes in and pairs with that codon, the amino acid contained on that codon is added to the polypeptide chain. This continues until a codon is reached for which there is no amino acid. In this case, the ribosome will fall off the mRNA and the polypeptide chain will be released, as a complete protein.