While you may think that a mutation is something bad (or maybe something cool that some superheroes have), the truth is that most mutations are neither good nor bad-they are called neutral.Ī recipe is not the only thing that affects how a cake comes out. If you put salt in your cake mix instead of sugar, your cake will not come out well. Some mutations may even be good or bad depending on the environment! In our analogy, a mutation that causes a disease would be like using the wrong recipe. Sometimes certain mutations in your genes can be bad for you and make you sick, while other mutations can protect you from disease. This is because their recipes are alike but not exactly the same. This would be like cupcakes and muffins-they are not the same, but they are pretty similar. Some people are more similar than others (for instance, you and your brother or sister look more alike than you and your friends). People are different from each other because of differences in their genes (recipes). Cupcakes are different from cookies because their recipes are different. Now, there are many types of food in the world, just like there are many types of people. Although our genes are like recipes, keep in mind that it is a very difficult recipe, with many (many!) ingredients and steps that we are still trying to discover and understand. In this example, you are the food, and your DNA is both the paper and the letters used to write the recipe. Think of genes as a recipe with instructions that list ingredients, amounts, and steps for how to make food. We could say that genes are small pieces of biological information, passed from parents to their children, encoded in the DNA. This is because families share some variations (also called mutations) in their genes. You might look a bit like your brother or sister. You might have the same hair color as your dad and the same eye color as your mom. On the other hand, you share very similar traits with members of your family. You may have different colored hair, skin, or eyes, or a different height, along with a whole bunch of other traits that make you look unique. We can measure and compare the degree of similarity in a trait between pairs of identical and non-identical twins, to understand how much of the difference in a trait between people is caused by genes and how much is caused by the environment.Įvery person in the world is different from every other. Identical twins share the same genes, while non-identical twins share, on average, half of their genes with the other twin. Twins and siblings can help us understand whether people are different because of genetic differences or because they live in different environments. Understanding how mutations shape us can be a bit tricky, because we are also affected by the world around us. Have you ever wondered why you look different from other people? Differences, such as height and hair color can come from differences in your genes called mutations.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |