The top picture is supposed to be the site EcoRI cuts but now it's just the symbol of some New Age Totalitarian Cult, based on restriction endonucleases.
EcoRI is what is known as a restriction endonuclease, it is a protein, and as mentioned many posts below, proteins are the little workerbee molecules that do everything in living cells from bacteria to humans. In this case, restriction endonucleases were used by bacteria to defend themselves against virus' by chopping up foreign DNA. However, molecular biologists found that they were useful for cutting DNA molecules at specific predictable sites, for many different uses. They cut at palindrome sequences on DNA, sequences where it reads the same one way, and then the opposite way on the other DNA strand. EcoRI the protein in this picture (protein art), cuts at GAATTC, the complementary strand being CTTAAG, thus palindrome. In this picture the orange ribbons are EcoRI, the restriction endonuclease, and the yellow tinkertoy is DNA
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