MOBILEMedCheckYour partner in health

DNAs are the instruction book of your body. To be healthy, you may exercise regularly, diet, watch your blood sugar, and visit your doctor with lots of questions. Do you really do your homework? study and understand what you are made of? What do we inherit from our biological parents to make us look similarly and even behave similarly?

What is DNA?

Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) is material that governs inheritance of eye color, hair color, bones, and other traits as well as diseases. It carries all of the instruction manual for making you who you are.

DNA is a very thin string, and is found in all living beings. Our body’s cells almost each contain a complete sample of our DNA, such as in skin cells, muscle cells, brain cells, liver cells, sperm cells, hair, teeth, saliva and others.  Basically, every part of the body is made up of these cells and each contains a set of DNA identical to that of every other cell within a given person.

DNA is  double-stranded held together by chemical bonds, and it is composed of four different molecules, which are designated by the four letters (A,T, G and C). These four letters are short nicknames for more complicated building-block chemical names, but actually the letters are used commonly. For example, to refer to a particular piece of DNA:  CATATTGCCTTTTACTGTAAAA.

The sequence of bases (letters) can code for many properties of the body’s cells.  There is very complicated regulation and management mechanism how cells can read this code.  Some DNA sequences encode important information for the cell, called  ”coding DNA.”  Our cells also contain much DNA that doesn’t encode anything, but they have regulationary functions that control gene expressions. Also there are a large number of DNAs we don’t really understand yet.