University:
Texas A&M University
Course:
BIOL 111 | Introductory Biology I
Academic year:

2024
Views:

100

Pages:

2
Author:

gaarmaakbn9h

Genetics Fun Facts o It takes about eight hours for one of your cells to completely copy its DNA. o The human DNA code is made up of about three thousand million A,T, C, and Gs on each side of the DNA strand. o If you were to start reciting the order of the ATCGs in your DNA tomorrow morning, at a rate of 100 each minute, 57 years would pass before you reached the end (provided that you did not stop to eat, drink, sleep, use the bathroom etc.) o If you were to stretch out the DNA from those 46 chromosomes in one cell and lay it end to end, it would be over 2 yards in length. o If the total DNA in one person were laid in a straight line, it would stretch to the sun and back over 30 times (it’s 93 million miles from here to the sun). o You could fit one thousand nuclei across the period at the end of this sentence. o You could fit one million threads of DNA across the period at the end of this sentence. o If the genome was a book, it would be the equivalent of 800 dictionaries. It would take a person typing 60 words per minute, eight hours a day, around 50 years to type the human genome. You would need 3 gigabytes of storage space on a computer to hold all of this o Organism # of genes Yeast 6,000 Drosophila 13,000 Nematode 18,000 Flowering plant 26,000 Human 30,000 Organism Human Gorilla Dog Dove Butterflies Bananas Adder Tongue Fern 1,200 # of chromosomes 46 48 78 16 380 (!) 66 o Humans are 99.9% genetically identical – only 0.1% of our genetic make-up differs. o information, and yet, all of it is contained inside the microscopic nucleus of a cell so tiny that it could easily fit on the head of a pin! o Our genes are remarkably similar to those of other life forms. For example, we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees, 90% with mice, 85% with zebra fish, 21% with worms, and 7% with a simple bacterium such as E. coli. o Less than 2% of the total DNA carries instructions to make proteins. The rest is misleadingly called ‘junk’ DNA, because it is a hodge-podge of sequences that does not seem to code for anything.