They draw in the ‘tickertape’ code-script that encodes a protein, and translate its sequence precisely, letter by letter, into the protein itself. To do so, they recruit all the building blocks (amino acids) needed, and link them together into a long chain, their order specified by the code-script. Ribosomes have an error rate of about one letter in 10,000, far lower than the defect rate in our own high-quality manufacturing processes. And they operate at a rate of about 10 amino acids per second, building whole proteins with chains comprising hundreds of amino acids in less than a minute.
