Question: What else can you find out through dna?

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 20 Nov 2014:

Oh man, if I listed everything I’d be typing into the weekend! 🙂

DNA is like a blueprint for your body. It is a really long molecule that spells out a code for amino acids. Amino acids are the chemicals that make up proteins, which is what most of our bodies are made of. By reading the right part of a cell’s DNA, you can tell things like:

-a person’s hair, eye and skin colour,
-whether their hair is straight, curly or wavy,
-whether they can taste cucumber (and some other things),
-whether they’re at risk from some types of cancer,
-if they have an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease in later life,
-what your blood type is,
-whether they can roll their tongues,
-whether they have cystic fibrosis,
-the shape of their ears!
-whether they’re colour blind or not

And loads more. DNA is almost everything you need to make a person, so it contains information on almost everything about that person!

There’s a lot of stuff DNA can’t tell you. It won’t tell you much about how your brain develops, because that happens under its own power and depends on the things you see, hear, smell and tough as you grow up. So we won’t be able to tell whether you’re generally a happy person, or which kind of chocolate you prefer, or whether you’ll like dancing, or anything like that. DNA will make the basic person, what kind of person they grow into is up to them 🙂