Difference between revisions of "Deoxyribonucleic acid"
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==DNA fingerprinting== | ==DNA fingerprinting== | ||
Revision as of 05:12, May 11, 2008
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is an organic chemical compound made up of molecules shaped like a double helix, a continuously twisted ladder. The individual monomeric building blocks of DNA (and other nucleic acids) are nucleotides, which themselves consist of three principle moieties: A nitrogenous base, a sugar, and a phosphate group.
DNA carries the genetic coding for the proteins that form the bodies of living organisms. All organisms contain DNA, and the DNA of a sexually reproducing organism is a mix of its parents' DNA.
DNA fingerprinting
DNA can help police track down criminals if an attacker leaves something like hair or blood at a crime scene. Everybody’s DNA is unique unless they are identical twins, and the genetic ‘fingerprint’ of this material can be enough to confirm if a suspect was at the scene. Genetic fingerprinting can also show if somebody is closely related to somebody else. Archaeologists used samples from living relatives to identify whether bodies found buried in a forest in Russia were the remains of the Tsar and his family, killed during the 1919 Russian revolution.
As well as showing how different we all are, DNA shows how much we are all the same. Only one small part of one chromosome distinguishes a boy from a girl. Genes give us different colored eyes, hair and skin, but 99.5% of any human's DNA is in the same order as everybody else’s.
Every living thing on earth has DNA that uses the same basic chemicals as human DNA, but because their chemicals are in a different order, the DNA of a worm or a tree encodes for different proteins, and those proteins make different cells. Evolutionists believe that all these cells developed from the first single-cell creatures formed three thousand million years ago, evolving gradually into new species to adapt to their environment. Creationists believe that God created living things as distinct "kinds", and point to information theory to show that the information on the DNA could not have arisen by chance.