BIOLOGY 101: WHAT IS DNA, THE BLOCKCHAIN OF LIFE! - IS DNA THE STORAGE SYSTEM OF THE FUTURE?

I'm happy to be sharing some of my Biology knowledge with you, but delivered in a very non-technical way. I majored in Biology for 5 years and also had many months of hands on experience with genetic engineering during a work placement opportunity. One of the most fascinating topics that we covered in our classes was about DNA, the molecule of life. Whilst we spent MANY weeks learning about the theory of what DNA actually is and what it does, it was always clear to me that we were dealing with a miraculous molecule that was very poorly understood. When I was majoring, the scientific world still called 99% of the DNA in our bodies as junk, because they didn't understand what it did. What was clear was that whatever it did, nobody even really understood how it came to be!

Life and Evolution is not the result of random mutations and natural selection!

One of my very first dissertations in University was titled 'Evolution'. This essay was one that I set out on with an open mind. I did my research about genetics and studied the Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection By Mr Charles Darwin, and put it all together in a very interesting essay. What surprised me very much was what I had to conclude after following the scientific facts. Before I state my conclusion I would like to mention that I received an A+ with distinction from my head of department and had the highest grade in the entire year. I was really surprised about by top grade, since the conclusion of my dissertation didn't really fit the general accepted rhetoric of the scientific establishment. What I was forced to conclude from my research was that whilst Darwin's Theory of Evolution could account for many of the more subtle refinements we see in all the lifeforms of this world, it could not account for the initial creation of it in the first place, or the evolution of complex organs such as the eye that has no selective pressure to encourage its evolution until it was already formed. Don't worry about the details here, the main point is that DNA shows pre-planning, intelligent design, and has all the hallmarks of an actual code that has been created. They do call DNA the genetic code, and once you understand it a bit, you will also come to see that DNA is indeed a very smart genetic program that is incredibly complex and defines life as we know it on planet Earth. Science now accepts that DNA shows intelligent design, and whilst they don't use the term God or Higher Power thay have had to conceed that there is too much that remains unexpainable by any theory! So what I am saying is that DNA is so amazing that it alone is virutally proof of God, or a higher and more intelligent power.

 

With that said, I would like to share with you a little bit about DNA, what it is, and what it does for us.. and even how in the future scientists could use DNA as the ultimate storage system. Did you know, for example that in the year 2009, you could fit ALL the world's computer and Internet data into 1 gram of DNA! Or to put another way, 1 gram of DNA can store 3.4×10²¹ bits (0.36 zettabytes)!

What is DNA?

DNA stands for DeoxyriboNucleic Acid. It is a double helix spiral that is very small and very long! DNA packs in a phenomenal amount of data into an impossibly small amount of space. If you extract all the DNA from one cell of our bodies, that DNA would be about 6 feet long. There is SO MUCH DNA in our entire bodies that if we took the DNA from all our cells it would stretch out for a distance of around 10 billion miles! Thats about the distance of the earth from the sun 100 times over. Maybe we should take a moment to let that sink in. Can you even comprehend it!? I can't! In order to pack this much data into our cells the DNA is coiled, super coiled and somehow conpacted 100 times more, to be able to fit it into the very nucleus of a cell. Let me just say that scientists have NO idea how this is achieved. They can account for around only 10% of the size reduction! It is part of the magic of life! One long packaged string of DNA is called a chromosome and we have 23 pairs of them. A chromosome is the largest single unit of DNA, and a base pair is the smallest. There are around 3 billion bases pairs in one chromosome!

Even though DNA is incredibly complex, it is also made up of very simple elements. In fact the entire genetic code is based on 4 different chemicals called Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C), and Thymine (T). It doesn't matter what these look like. All you need to know is that the genetic alphabet has only only four letters, called Bases. With such a limited alphabet, it is quite astonishing that it is able to be decoded into the vast array of life that we have today. It is possible because it is a code, quite literally. Our body is made up of cells and each cell has its own copy of our DNA. Each of our cells uses this copy to determine what to do, what to make, and when to make it. It is a bit like a biological blockchain! Our DNA is decentralized throughout our entire body, and is therefore a very safe way to keep the code of life safe.

To understand the fundamentals of DNA you just need to know one more thing! Each element (A,G,T or C) will pair naturally with one other element. 'A' will only and always pair with 'T' and 'G' with 'C'. This simple chemical reaction results in the double helix, whereby we have one strand of DNA that is the actual template and code for life. That strand is bound to a complementary strand that can be seen as a kind of mirror copy of DNA. These two strands together form the double helix spiral that we know DNA to be today!

DNA, The Greatest Factory on Earth

The cells of our body can be likened to the most complex and efficient manufacturing plant ever imagined. Life has evolved so that our bodies are somehow able to take a ridiculously complex code and use that to create and maintain life. The manufacturing of things that our bodies need is one of the big roles of DNA and is called Protein Synthesis. If you studied the mechanics and detail of how the body manages to decode, transcribe, and create proteins and enzymes that we need to live you would probably be very amazed. The process is one that involves 1000's of different collaborative cellular activities that happen in perfect synchronicity and with nearly 100% accuracy. Protein synthesis is too hard to explain in a post, suffice is to say that it is enough to make me aware that a higher power simply had to be involved in this miracle of life. To say that these processes happen as a result of random mutations, or step by step changes simply ignores the profanity of what is actually happening in every cell of our bodies all of the time. This is intelligence beyond anything that even our greatest engineers could ever dream of!

DNA Replicates itself and creates its own variations of itself!

When we create new life from our own, it is our DNA that matters most! The way in which nature allows us to combine our parental DNA and form new and varied children is another miracle of life! Have you ever wondered why two people almost never have the same looking children?! This is because our cells make sure of this in a process called meiosis. One thing that is very good for life is to have a varied genome. If we all have different weaknesses and strengths, then if something happens that challenges us, such as a certain bug or a climate change, some of us will likely be better able to survive than others due to this natural variation. It is actually key to our survival and something that happens in another process that is so amazing that it is a wonder it even works at all. All that is needed for new life to form is half a copy of DNA from our mothet and father, and one cell from the mother that contains everything that is needed for life to form. At this point I have to ask, is it our DNA that is alive or is it us!? Maybe we are our DNA?!

What controls the DNA? How does DNA know what to do?

These questions are very good ones and are ones that even the best scientists only have a lose handle on. What we do know is that there are different parts of DNA. Some parts of our DNA code for specific proteins and building blocks of life and they are called our genes. A gene is a simple unit of DNA that codes for a long string of amino acids. To give you a sense of scale, one gene or protein would on average be coded by 27,000 Bases (or 27,000 A,T,C or G's) . All the proteins in our body are made up of around 20 amino acids.. Our bodies can make 11 of them (non essential amino acids) and the other 9 we need to eat in our diet. Therefore the genes make up a series of amino acids that when formed into a complex molecule by the body end up becoming a functional protein. Our genes make up around 1% of all our DNA, and so there is a LOT more going on than just coding for material things. DNA also controls itself, sometimes in response to signals or stimuli, but it is also independent and just gets on and does its thing. It is estimated that around 8% of our DNA is regulatory and involved in deciding when to produce some proteins and how much and for how long. The body self regulates some of these signals by the use of hormones and other chemicals that the body produces. It is good to understand that around 90% of DNA is totally not understood. It is fair to say that our DNA seems to hold all the recorded history of life up until this point within it.. again, just like the blockchain does! This explains why we share anywhere from 94-99% of our DNA with chimps, and why we are 75% identical to a mouse and 36% identical to a fruit fly. We have within every cell of our bodies a history and map of life and not just our own!

DNA is totally incredible and almost out of the reach of our understanding! With DNA it is possible to create almost anything and everything that we see in the world today. When DNA wants to, it will take a caterpillar and turn it into a butterfly. The same could be said for us humans! If we learned to control our DNA and switch things on that were dormant, we could also literally grown wings overnight and fly away. Nothing is impossible once we truly understand our DNA and how it works. Whilst we have come a long way in the past 50 years on this, we are still a very long way away from being able to really understand and potentially harness the power of DNA. The biggest collaborative project we have initiated to do this was the Human Genome Project. This project very simply set our to provide an accurate sequence of the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome, and as a result to discover the 20,000 or 25,000 genes that make up a part of that. This project completed in 2003, and is used today to help to understand and aid medical research and more. It was a very small step in the direction of really understanding life and how our DNA works.

The Future and Potential For DNA and Genetic Engineering

Whilst I have a great respect for science I am also quite weary of the implications of modern science in the field of genetics. The very fact that the best word scientists have to describe 90% of our DNA as is Junk says it all to me! We have the potential to change and alter ourselves beyond anything that has preceded us. In the future we will have the ability to essentially create genetic 3d printers that can become any kind of object of life form by simple programming and creating a string of DNA. Perhaps that is how we came to be, perhaps that is our destiny, or perhaps that will be our great downfall. Who can say what we were meant to be, or where evolution will take us. What I can say is that whilst we live in a survival of the fittest, capitalist based world that is built on control and manipulation, the idea of genetics engineering is quite a scary one. Perhaps one day we will learn ways to use this technology in good ways that are in harmony with our own human nature. In the meantime, I left the laboratory and this crazy and amazing field of Genetics far behind!

I hope you have found this little Biology lesson interesting and that you have learned something new here. Please let me know in the comments if you would like to know more details on anything I have spoken about, such as how exactly the body manages to turn a code into a product! Else please feel free to ask anything else you might want to understand better about life, and nature.

 

 

SOURCES:

https://www.thoughtco.com/interesting-dna-facts-608188
http://www.kickassfacts.com/25-kickass-and-interesting-facts-about-dna
http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/top10facts/394517/Top-10-facts-about-DNA
https://www.yourgenome.org/facts/what-is-dna
https://holykaw.alltop.com/17-interesting-facts-about-dna
https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/weird-but-true-facts-about-dna
https://dnatesting.com/dna-facts-that-just-may-shock-you/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28data%29

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