Nucleases are proteins that break phosphodiester links in DNA and RNA. The poly-A tail is added to mRNA in eukaryotic cells to protect it from degrading in the cytoplasm and allowing it to efficiently translate and deliver the polypeptide sequence.

The question is whether the mRNA that was transcripted would decay if prokaryotic organisms possessed a nuclease. Simultaneously, the question arises: how can it be translated into a polypeptide sequence?