Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Chomosomes
Chomosomes
Genes
A gene is the basic physical and functional unit of heredity. Genes, which
are made up of DNA, act as instructions to make molecules called proteins.
In humans, genes vary in size from a few hundred DNA bases to more than
2 million bases.
gene is a locus (or region) of DNA which is made up of nucleotides and is
the molecular unit ofheredity. The transmission of genes to an
organism's offspring is the basis of the inheritance ofphenotypic traits. Most
biological traits are under the influence of polygenes (many different genes)
as well as thegeneenvironment interactions. Some genetic traits are
instantly visible, such as eye colour or number of limbs, and some are not,
such as blood type, risk for specific diseases, or the thousands of
basic biochemical processes that comprise life. In July 2016, scientists
reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the Last Universal Common
Ancestor (LUCA) of all organisms living on Earth.
Genes can acquire mutations in their sequence, leading to different
variants, known as alleles, in the population. These alleles encode slightly
different versions of a protein, which cause different phenotype traits.
Colloquial usage of the term "having a gene" (e.g., "good genes," "hair
colour gene") typically refers to having a different allele of the gene.
Genes evolve due to natural selection or survival of the fittest of the alleles
Dna
DNA) is a molecule that carries the genetic instructions used in the growth,
development, functioning and reproduction of all known
living organisms and many viruses. DNA and RNA are nucleic acids;
alongside proteins, lipids and complex carbohydrates (polysaccharides),
they are one of the four major types of macromolecule that are essential for
all known forms of life. Most DNA molecules consist of
twobiopolymer strands coiled around each other to form a double helix.
The two DNA strands are known as polynucleotides since they are
composed of simpler units called nucleotides. Each nucleotide is composed
of a nitrogen-containing nucleobase
either cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), orthymine (T)as well as
a sugar called deoxyribose and a phosphate group. The nucleotides are
joined to one another in a chain by covalent bonds between the sugar of
one nucleotide and the phosphate of the next, resulting in an
alternating sugar-phosphate backbone. The nitrogenous bases of the two
separate polynucleotide strands are bound together (according to base
pairing rules (A with T, and C with G) with hydrogen bonds to make doublestranded DNA. The total amount of related DNA base pairs on Earth is