Genetics for Dummies

More old Palm pilot gems. I copied this from somewhere erudite - wish I'd been more diligent in keeping the source reference.

A Cell has a helix shaped string of DNA - think of a set of encylopedias containing complete blueprint for life.

DNA is a set of 23 pairs of 'books' (chromosomes) in the set.

Each word in the books is a Gene (100, 000 of them).

The words are made up of 4 main letters - G (guanine), A (adenine). T (thymine), C (cytosine).

These letters are nucleotides. There are 3b of them in total in a DNA string, 90% of which do nothing.

The genome project is mapping the 100,000 genes and their role.

Single Genes may cause disease such as cystic fibrosis. Combinations of genes may cause more complex conditions (obesity for example).

Once a growing cell splits from 8 to 16 the cell begins to specialise and only reads a part of the book.

Clones are easily created at the cellular level as in identical twins.

Dolly the sheep proved that an old DNA strand can be tricked from its specific role back in time to accessing the full encyclopedia.

Thus it is a new form of cloning, more akin to genetic-level engineering than twinning.