Some Facts About Genes

Inside every cell is in every living thing is a tiny twist of a chemical called DNA.  DNA is basically life’s recipe book, and the DNA in each of your body’s cells contains all the information needed to make a new you.

DNA contains instructions for every single ingredient of you.  These instructions are called genes.

Your body’s cells have each got about 23,000 genes in them.  But before you get too smug about how complex you are, even a nematode worm’s got 20,000 genes.  And a mustard plant’s got 27,000.

A woman’s claims to be Anastasia, the “lost” Russian princess whose family were killed in 1917, were proven false by comparing her DNA with some from the victims’ descendants.

Genetic modification, or GM, means taking genes out of one organism’s DNA and putting them in another.  in 1985, scientists put genes for human growth factor in a pig, which then grew so big it became crippled with arthritis.

Some DNA, called mitochondrial DNA, changes very little over time.  It has been used to trace the ancestry of the entire human race.  The evidence suggests that we are all descended from a woman who lived in Africa 250,000 years ago.

Scientists could genetically alter spinach to make it taste like chocolate so children eat it.  They also hope to take out the gene for the chemical in onions that makes you cry – and make no-tears onions.

In 1953, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilson, and James Watson found that DNA is shaped like a twisted rope ladder, a shape called a double helix.

In the mid 1990s, scientists came up with a clever way to stop fungus spreading through a potato crop.  They inserted the gene for a substance called barnase into potato plants.  Now the plants produce floods of barnase whenever they are attacked by fungus.  The barnase kills the plants.  The infected plant effectively commits suicide, and this stops the fungus from spreading.

“What could be better than a self-shearing sheep?” thought Australian scientists.  They put genes into a sheep that made its wool drop out once it reached a certain length.  It certainly saved on the shearing.  But the poor naked sheep suffered terrible sunburn.

Image via Wikipedia