How do read a person’s DNA?
How do read a person’s DNA?
DNA (which stands for deoxyribonucleic acid) contains all the information needed to make your body work. It is also surprisingly simple.
DNA is made from four chemical building blocks, which are arranged one after each other. This sequence is the instruction manual for your body. The building blocks are called adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, but we usually just call them A, T, G and C.
As we grow, cells in our body divide. One cell becomes two. Every time this happens each of the new cells needs a full copy of DNA. DNA makes this easy, because it’s made of two strands. When a cell divides the strands split up, and a new copy is made of each one. Let’s look at how this is done.
The letter A on one strand is always opposite the letter T on the other, and G is always opposite C.
Reading DNA
We can use this knowledge of how DNA copies itself to read a person’s DNA.
To do this, a scientist puts the DNA into four tubes. Then they add all the machinery that the cell uses to copy DNA, and lots of extra As, Ts, Cs and Gs into each of the tubes.
Next, they add some DNA letters that have been changed so they can’t join with the next letter in the sequence. You can think of them like pieces of Lego, but with flat tops so you can’t add a brick on top of it. Let’s call these special DNA letters A*, T*, G* and C*.
Each of our four tubes gets some of the special DNA letters added to it: A*s in the first tube, T*s in the second, G*s in the third and C*s in the fourth.
Let’s imagine what happens with our DNA sequence in the tube containing A*.
The scientist reading the DNA knows that each strand in this tube ends in an A*. She then counts how many pairs are in each strand of DNA. By doing this, she can work out that the 2nd, 5th and 8th letters are all As.
Reading DNA is useful because sometimes the letters in the genes aren’t quite right, like a misspelled word in a set of instructions. This might cause some of your cells to not work properly.
For example, just one wrong letter in one particular gene might mean someone is more likely to become diabetic, or get cancer when they are older. Reading someone’s DNA allows doctors to spot and treat these diseases before they become too bad.
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