Nobel Laureate Dr. Rich Roberts describes the flow of information from DNA to RNA to protein.

The central dogma basically says that the information in an organism, that decides and organism, that describes everything that it can do is encoded in the DNA. And that DNA is then copied into something called RNA, which is very similar, it has exactly the same sequence as DNA, but it's easily changed. It's much easier to work with, it can be degraded whereas DNA is rather solid. And then from the information in the RNA, you can then make protein by reading the sequence of bases in the RNA three at a time and three code for one amino acid. So if you want to make a hundred amino acid protein, you need a piece of RNA that is 300 bases long. But in a bacterium, you can make the RNA and it looks exactly like the DNA and it can then go straight into the ribosome in order to make the protein. But in eukaryotes, when you make the first piece of RNA, you can't read it three at a time because it's got all of these extra segments in it that are separating out the coding region. And so you have to do this cutting and splicing process in order to then make something that looks like a bacterial messenger RNA.

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