Category Archives: DNA

In order to truly answer the question of What is DNA? one has to go back to the elementary or high school biology classes. DNA is the complex chemical that carries genetic information. DNA dictates life in two manners: There are elements called chromosomes in each cell of the human body. To be more precise, each cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes. Youll be astonished to know that some 50 to 100 thousand genes are held within these chromosomes. Since each of these genes could take value from one of the two values of its parent cells, hence you can imagine the possible variability in this structure. These genes are made up of what is called DNA that is Deoxyribose Nucleic Acids. Apart from these genes that carry essential genetic information and only account for 2% of DNAs structure, the rest of the 98% of DNA is still a mystery. Biologists call it junk DNA as there are no known proteins or traits that are coded or built by this part of DNA. This junk DNA, as well as the genetic information-carrying part only, varies in structure owing to the presence of four nucleotide bases throughout the DNA in differing … Continue reading →

We encourage you to search for a family surname in our SURNAMES DATABASE. Our database contains family names of clients who have already ordered a DNA profile from Family Tree DNA. After you have searched for the surname that interests you, the name will appear in the result screen with a number after the name, e.g. Bowling (62). This indicates that the name Bowling is in our database and that 62 people with that surname (or a derivative) have already ordered a DNA sample tested. It is possible that not all 62 Bowlings have been added yet to our Recent Ancestral Origins (RAO) Database as we may be awaiting the analysis from the Lab for some of them. A link will be provided for you to order a genetic test below the result screen. If the surname you desire is not located in our database, you will receive a message entitled "Name not found," and a form will be provided below the message to enable you to order a test kit for that surname. Posting and updating to our database is instant. After you have registered your surname, you can search again to find the name in the updated database. … Continue reading →

After conducting the test, as expected, Mr. Brown verifies that all three have exactly the same Y-DNA STR marker profile. After speaking with his grand-uncle, he was able to trace distant relatives in Europe who share his surname. After contacting various members of his European line, he obtained 9 participants and the results of the test show the following: Mr. Brown and his cousin share the same Y-DNA STR marker profile. He also shares the same Y-DNA STR marker profile as group 2 and group 5 of his European line. There is a single mutation in group 3 and group 4, indicating that although they are related, it is more distant, and that groups 3 and 4 are closely related to each other. Group 7, however is not related to this particular Brown family line. After finding out this exciting information, his newfound European family lines were able to bring more extended family into the surname project, and within a few months, Mr. Brown was able to connect and piece together a large puzzle of his ancestry. Excerpt from: Home - DNA Ancestry Project … Continue reading →

Biologists in the 1940s had difficulty in accepting DNA as the genetic material because of the apparent simplicity of its chemistry. DNA was known to be a long polymer composed of only four types of subunits, which resemble one another chemically. Early in the 1950s, DNA was first examined by x-ray diffraction analysis, a technique for determining the three-dimensional atomic structure of a molecule (discussed in Chapter 8). The early x-ray diffraction results indicated that DNA was composed of two strands of the polymer wound into a helix. The observation that DNA was double-stranded was of crucial significance and provided one of the major clues that led to the Watson-Crick structure of DNA. Only when this model was proposed did DNA's potential for replication and information encoding become apparent. In this section we examine the structure of the DNA molecule and explain in general terms how it is able to store hereditary information. A DNA molecule consists of two long polynucleotide chains composed of four types of nucleotide subunits. Each of these chains is known as a DNA chain, or a DNA strand. Hydrogen bonds between the base portions of the nucleotides hold the two chains together (). As we … Continue reading →

DNA - STRUCTURE This page, looking at the structure of DNA, is the first in a sequence of pages leading on to how DNA replicates (makes copies of) itself, and then to how information stored in DNA is used to make protein molecules. This material is aimed at 16 - 18 year old chemistry students. If you are interested in this from a biological or biochemical point of view, you may find these pages a useful introduction before you get more information somewhere else. Chemistry students at UK A level (or its various equivalents) should not waste time on this. The booklet is written for A level biology students, and goes into far more detail than you will need for chemistry purposes. A quick look at the whole structure of DNA These days, most people know about DNA as a complex molecule which carries the genetic code. Most will also have heard of the famous double helix. I'm going to start with a diagram of the whole structure, and then take it apart to see how it all fits together. The diagram shows a tiny bit of a DNA double helix. Normally I prefer to draw my own diagrams, but … Continue reading →

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People have known for many years that living things inherit traits from their parents. That common-sense observation led to agriculture, the purposeful breeding and cultivation of animals and plants for desirable characteristics. Firming up the details took quite some time, though. Researchers did not understand exactly how traits were passed to the next generation until the middle of the 20th century. Now it is clear that genes are what carry our traits through generations and that genes are made of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). But genes themselves don't do the actual work. Rather, they serve as instruction books for making functional molecules such as ribonucleic acid (RNA) and proteins, which perform the chemical reactions in our bodies. Proteins do many other things, too. They provide the body's main building materials, forming the cell's architecture and structural components. But one thing proteins can't do is make copies of themselves. When a cell needs more proteins, it uses the manufacturing instructions coded in DNA. The DNA code of a genethe sequence of its individual DNA building blocks, labeled A (adenine), T (thymine), C (cytosine) and G (guanine) and collectively called nucleotides spells out the exact order of a protein's building blocks, amino acids. … Continue reading →

DNA DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid) is the molecule that carries the genetic information in all cellular forms of life and some viruses. It belongs to a class of molecules called the nucleic acids, which are polynucleotides - that is, long chains of nucleotides. Each nucleotide consists of three components: The backbone of the polynucleotide is a chain of sugar and phosphate molecules. Each of the sugar groups in this sugar-phosphate backbone is linked to one of the four nitrogenous bases. Strand of polynucleotides DNA's ability to store - and transmit - information lies in the fact that it consists of two polynucleotide strands that twist around each other to form a double-stranded helix. The bases link across the two strands in a specific manner using hydrogen bonds: cytosine (C) pairs with guanine (G), and adenine (A) pairs with thymine (T). Double strand of polynucleotides The double helix of the complete DNA molecule resembles a spiral staircase, with two sugar phosphate backbones and the paired bases in the centre of the helix. This structure explains two of the most important properties of the molecule. First, it can be copied or 'replicated', as each strand can act as a template for the … Continue reading →

Illustration by Wes Fernandes/Nature For Nick Goldman, the idea of encoding data in DNA started out as a joke. It was Wednesday 16 February 2011, and Goldman was at a hotel in Hamburg, Germany, talking with some of his fellow bioinformaticists about how they could afford to store the reams of genome sequences and other data the world was throwing at them. He remembers the scientists getting so frustrated by the expense and limitations of conventional computing technology that they started kidding about sci-fi alternatives. We thought, 'What's to stop us using DNA to store information?' Then the laughter stopped. It was a lightbulb moment, says Goldman, a group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, UK. True, DNA storage would be pathetically slow compared with the microsecond timescales for reading or writing bits in a silicon memory chip. It would take hours to encode data by synthesizing DNA strings with a specific pattern of bases, and still more hours to recover that information using a sequencing machine. But with DNA, a whole human genome fits into a cell that is invisible to the naked eye. For sheer density of information storage, DNA could be orders of magnitude … Continue reading →

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions for the development and function of living things. All known cellular life and some viruses contain DNA. The main role of DNA in the cell is the long-term storage of information. It is often compared to a blueprint, since it contains the instructions to construct other components of the cell, such as proteins and RNA molecules. The DNA segments that carry genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in regulating the expression of genetic information. In eukaryotes such as animals and plants, DNA is stored inside the cell nucleus, while in prokaryotes such as bacteria and archaea, the DNA is in the cell's cytoplasm. Unlike enzymes, DNA does not act directly on other molecules; rather, various enzymes act on DNA and copy its information into either more DNA, in DNA replication, or transcribe it into protein. Other proteins such as histones are involved in the packaging of DNA or repairing the damage to DNA that causes mutations. DNA is a long polymer of simple units called nucleotides, which are held together by a backbone made of sugars and phosphate groups. … Continue reading →