When we’re sorting beads to talk about what kinds of information is in the genome, where do genes fit in?
Well, first let’s talk about proteins. DNA, as you know, is instructions. It doesn’t actually do much; it’s just instructions for how to build a living thing. The actual work of doing the building, and, often, the building blocks themselves, are another class of molecules called proteins. A gene is a piece of DNA that contains directions on how to build a specific protein. Proteins then do the work. Other sections of the DNA ladder that aren’t genes, but are still very important, have instructions on where, when, and how to build that protein, so that what should be built during infancy doesn’t get built instead during adolescence, for instance, or so that your bone cells don’t start making the same proteins that are made in the skin. These “when, where and how” type of instructions are called regulatory DNA. It’s slightly more complicated than that, though, because the vast majority of genes in the human genome contain pieces of other DNA that doesn’t code for protein. The parts of ge
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