-
Asked by 873ntrd43 to NULL, Uday on 13 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by hannahbanana.
-
NULL answered on 13 Nov 2015:
Genes are little snippets of instructions, like a recipe for a cake that exist in all your cells.
In fact, each of your cells has a copy of all the genes – so a full recipe book in each cell.
They are coded in DNA, which is a very long molecule that lives in the nulceus of each cell in your body.
Genes don’t make cakes or muffins, they actually have instructions for making proteins, and proteins are very important for lots of different things in your body – they control how you absorb food, how cells communicate with each other (like nerve cells, and immune cells in your blood). Each different type of cell will only read some of the recipes (genes), so they each have different proteins in them, and that’s how each cell ends up doing different things in your body – muscle cells, nerve cells, bone-making cells, blood cells….
Genes are also important because they get copied when a cell divides into two. Each of the two “daughter” cells also has to have a copy of all the genes. Sometimes the DNA gets changed a little, though, when it gets copied, and diseases can arise from that. If a gene’s instructions change, you can get a protein that doesn’t work right, or doesn’t get made at all, which leads to a disease.
-
-
Comments
Dilip commented on :
Genes are code letters that make up our proteins in animals and plants. In humans, there are 5 such letters (A, T, C, G, U), which has specific chemical structures. So the programming of these 5 letters, with certain rules applied, dictate the production of building blocks of proteins called amino acids.