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 →