RNA Trivia
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90 free RNA trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
DNA gets the headlines, but RNA does the work. It carries the message, reads the code, builds the protein and, in a good number of viruses, is the entire genome. It can also act as an enzyme, which is why many biologists think an RNA world came before DNA and proteins existed at all. This quiz covers RNA from the ground up: the sugar and the base that set it apart from DNA, the three classic types and what each one does, the cloverleaf and the anticodon, the splicing machinery, and the long list of Nobel Prizes that RNA research has produced — from Severo Ochoa in 1959 to Katalin Karikó in 2023 and the microRNA prize of 2024. Retroviruses, reverse transcriptase, RNA interference and the lipid nanoparticles inside an mRNA vaccine all get their turn. The early questions are introductory-biology level; the late ones ask for the names of enzymes, the size of a microRNA and who coined 'RNA world'. Fifty questions, every one sourced.
30 of 90 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which base does RNA use in place of DNA's thymine?
Uracil
Uracil. Thymine is just uracil with a methyl group added; because cytosine can decay into uracil, DNA's repair enzymes treat any uracil they find there as damage and cut it out.
Q 02Which feature of the ribose sugar chemically distinguishes RNA from DNA?
A 2' hydroxyl group
A 2' hydroxyl group. That one extra –OH can attack RNA's own backbone, which is why RNA breaks down so much more easily than DNA, the sturdier long-term store.
Q 03Which two bases are the purines RNA shares with DNA?
Adenine and guanine
Adenine and guanine. Purines are built on a double ring and pair only with single-ring partners, which keeps every rung of a double helix the same width.
Q 04Who discovered nucleic acids in the 1860s and called the material 'nuclein'?
Friedrich Miescher
Friedrich Miescher. He found it in pus, washing white blood cells off used bandages that a surgical clinic near his Tübingen laboratory sent over.
Q 05Which type of RNA makes up about 80% of the RNA in most cells?
Ribosomal RNA
Ribosomal RNA. It is never translated into protein itself; cells need it in bulk because it is the main building material of ribosomes, which in bacteria hold more RNA than protein.
Q 06Which pair, Nobel winners for gene control, coined 'messenger RNA'?
Jacob and Monod
Jacob and Monod. Working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, they proposed in 1961 that a short-lived RNA copy ferries each gene's instructions out to the ribosomes, where proteins are made.
Q 07What is added to the 5' end of a eukaryotic messenger RNA soon after it starts being made?
A modified guanine cap
A modified guanine cap. The methylated guanine is joined on backwards, through a rare 5'-to-5' link, and it steadies the message and helps it bind a ribosome.
Q 08What does the poly(A) tail on a messenger RNA chiefly protect it from?
Exonucleases
Exonucleases. These enzymes chew an RNA from its ends, and the tail holds them off; oddly, in bacteria a poly(A) tail does the opposite and marks a message for destruction.
Q 09The secondary structure of transfer RNA is usually drawn in what shape?
A cloverleaf
In three dimensions the cloverleaf folds into an L shape that slots into the ribosome's A and P sites.
Q 10Which part of a transfer RNA reads the three-letter words of a messenger RNA?
Anticodon
Anticodon. It is allowed to pair loosely with the third letter of each word, a 'wobble' that lets one transfer RNA read more than one of the 61 coding words.
Q 11What does a transfer RNA carry on the CCA tail at its 3' end?
Amino acid
Amino acid. A separate loading enzyme for each of the 20 kinds attaches the right one to the right tRNA, so those enzymes, not the ribosome, are what match each coding word to its meaning.
Q 12Unlike DNA with its famous double helix, RNA in cells is usually found in what form?
A single strand
A single strand. With no partner strand to hold it straight, an RNA can fold back and pair with itself, and those folds give each kind of RNA the shape it needs to work.
Q 13Which enzyme copies the DNA of a gene into a strand of RNA?
RNA polymerase
Q 21Which part of a human cell keeps its own ribosomes and transfer RNAs, a legacy of its bacterial ancestry?
Mitochondria
Mitochondria. They descend from bacteria that took up life inside an ancestral cell, and they still carry a tiny genome of 37 genes, most of them recipes for their own RNAs.
Q 22Which Nobel-winning tool, borrowed from the immune defences of bacteria, uses a guide RNA to find its target?
CRISPR
CRISPR. Bacteria file away snippets of viruses that once attacked them and copy these into RNA guides, which lead a cutting enzyme to any matching invader; scientists learned to reprogram the guide.
Q 23In which part of a human cell is the RNA for new ribosomes produced?
The nucleolus
RNA polymerase. It latches onto a promoter, a short stretch of DNA that marks where a gene begins, parts the two strands and copies one of them until a stop signal knocks it off.
Q 14Who first observed ribosomes in the mid-1950s with an electron microscope?
George Emil Palade
George Emil Palade. He described them in 1955 as dense specks studding the cell's inner membranes, then went on to trace the route that newly made proteins take through the cell.
Q 15A bacterial ribosome's 50S and 30S subunits join into a 70S whole because Svedberg units measure what?
Sedimentation rate
Sedimentation rate. A Svedberg value records how fast a particle settles in a centrifuge, which depends on its shape as well as its mass, so the two subunits' numbers do not simply add up.
Q 16Why are ribosomes classified as ribozymes?
Their catalytic core is RNA
Their catalytic core is RNA. Every bond in a new protein is forged by RNA, while the ribosome's dozens of proteins sit around the surface as scaffolding.
Q 17Which protozoan was Thomas Cech studying when he found an RNA that cuts itself?
Tetrahymena
Tetrahymena. In a test tube with no protein present, a stretch of its RNA cut itself out and rejoined the ends, overturning the rule that every enzyme is a protein.
Q 18Who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Cech for discovering catalytic RNA?
Sidney Altman
Sidney Altman. He studied RNase P, an enzyme that trims newly made transfer RNAs, and showed that its RNA part can do the cutting on its own, without the protein.
Q 19Which self-cutting RNA enzyme, first found in plant pathogens, takes its name from the outline of its folded structure?
Hammerhead
Hammerhead. Early diagrams of its three joined helices looked like the head of a hammerhead shark; some plant pathogens use it to cut their freshly copied RNA into single genome lengths.
Q 20Which Harvard biologist, a Nobel winner for a way to sequence DNA, coined the term 'RNA world' in 1986?
Walter Gilbert
Walter Gilbert. He only named it: Leslie Orgel and Carl Woese, among others, had argued back in the 1960s that RNA came first, long before any RNA enzyme was found.
The nucleolus. This dense knot inside the nucleus is a ribosome workshop: it copies the RNA, wraps it in proteins brought in from outside, and sends out the two half-built halves of each ribosome.
Q 24Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the 2024 Nobel Prize for discovering which gene-silencing molecules?
MicroRNAs
MicroRNAs. The first, found in 1993, was written off as a quirk of one laboratory animal until Ruvkun showed in 2000 that a second is shared across the animal kingdom, humans included.
Q 25Fire and Mello's Nobel-winning gene-silencing work used which organism?
Caenorhabditis elegans
Caenorhabditis elegans. Injecting this tiny worm with double-stranded RNA silenced the matching gene where either strand alone did nothing, and the effect spread between cells and even to its offspring.
Q 26Which enzyme chops long double-stranded RNA into short siRNAs?
Dicer
Dicer. True to its name, it dices the long strands into pieces a little over 20 letters long, and each piece then guides a silencing complex to any message that matches it.
Q 27Early RNA-silencing clues came from trying to deepen the colour of which flower?
Petunia
Petunia. Extra copies of a pigment gene were meant to deepen the colour, but many blooms came out white instead: the added genes had shut down the plant's own along with themselves.
Q 28The 2018 drug patisiran was first to exploit which discovery?
RNA interference
RNA interference. Twenty years after the effect was reported in 1998, patisiran used a short double-stranded RNA to silence the faulty gene behind a rare inherited nerve disease.
Q 29Which enzyme lets a retrovirus copy its RNA genome into DNA?
Reverse transcriptase
Reverse transcriptase. It runs the cell's usual DNA-to-RNA flow backwards, which is the 'retro' in retrovirus, and blocking it was the basis of AZT, the first approved HIV drug.
Q 30Which two scientists independently discovered the enzyme that copies RNA into DNA?
Temin and Baltimore
Temin and Baltimore. Temin had proposed years earlier that some RNA viruses write themselves into DNA, against the accepted rule that information flows only the other way; then both men found the enzyme.