25th April: DNA Day

Today is DNA day. Here are a few things you might not know about DNA.

1. DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid.
2. DNA was first isolated by the Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher in 1869, in the pus of discarded surgical bandages. He called it "nuclein". However, he didn't make any connection between this stuff and heredity. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick suggested what is now accepted as the first correct double-helix model of DNA structure.
3. All human cells have DNA in them except for Red Blood cells. If unwound and tied together, the strands of DNA in one cell would stretch almost six feet but would be only 50 trillionths of an inch wide. If you did that to all the DNA in a human body, it would reach from the Earth to the Sun and back over 600 times or from Earth to Pluto and back.
4. Your DNA is 99.9% identical to that of every other human being on Earth, 98% identical to that of a chimpanzee and 50% to that of a Banana. People living outside of Africa also have about 1-4% Neanderthal DNA proving that the two species interbred at some stage.
5. The first animal to have its DNA completely sequenced was a nematode worm in 1998.
6. 8% of human DNA is made of Viruses that used to infect prehistoric man.
7. A single gram of DNA is capable of holding 700 terabytes of data, which means if you wanted to store all the digital information that exists in the world in DNA format, you'd only need two grams of it.
8. A cell has three billion base pairs of DNA. It would take 30 years of nonstop typing to type them all out, and the text would fill 200 Telephone directories.
9. DNA is built using only four building blocks, the nucleotides adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine.
10. Some people have two distinct sets of DNA. This can happens when a foetus absorbs its twin in the very early stages of pregnancy. This is not as rare as you might expect, and causes no obvious effects so a person could go through their entire lives and never know they had “Chimerism”, as the condition has been named. Often it is only discovered when people need compatible organs for a transplant, or when a DNA test is done. A woman in Washington, for example, had a DNA test in 2002 which showed she wasn't the mother of her own children. This led to her being accused of fraud and a long court battle until it was eventually found that she had chimerism.

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