Is Your DNA a Digital Code?
If you were to zoom in on your body—past the skin, past the cells, right down to the molecular “basement”—you wouldn’t find a soup of random chemicals. You would find an engineering masterpiece. To understand […]
Unit 1: Digging Deeper
At the Human Genome Project website of the National Institutes of Health, we find these overview comments (https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Epigenetics): “Epigenetics is an emerging field of science that studies heritable changes caused by the activation and deactivation […]
Unit 5: Digging Deeper
#1 Did you know… that like mRNA, tRNA is transcribed and processed in the nucleus and then exported to the cytoplasm to do its job? Transfer RNA’s structure is single stranded but develops a secondary and […]
Unit 4: Digging Deeper
1. Did you know… that at Quora.com/what-is-the-shortest-rna/ we read about three such short kinds of RNA? Here’s the overview: “RNA primers, microRNA, and small interfering RNA (or short interfering RNA) are some of the shortest RNA molecules. […]
Unit 2: Digging Deeper
Non-protein amino acids (also sometimes spelled without a space as “nonprotein”) are found both in living things and outside–in the realm of nature outside of biology. There are over 140 of the non-protein amino acids […]
UNIT 3: Digging Deeper
#1. Did you know… that Nucleic acids represent an important class of macromolecules that largely serve as the genetic material in living organisms and viruses? In fact, it is a bit shocking to learn that they are […]
The Basic Structure of Amino Acids
We’ve previously examined how the central dogma of molecular biology hinges on the precise translation of genetic information into proteins, utilizing a specific set of 20 proteinogenic amino acids. The term “proteinogenic amino acids” refers […]
Epigenetics and DNA Methylation
Epigenetics is a dynamic and rapidly expanding field within biology that is transforming our understanding of heredity, gene expression, and cellular function. The term “epigenetics,” derived from the Greek prefix epi, meaning “above” or “on […]
Where Does Life Come From? Early Ideas About Life’s Origins
Imagine cracking open a rotten log and seeing maggots wriggling inside, or noticing frogs suddenly appearing in a drying pond. For centuries, naturalists and philosophers observed these kinds of phenomena and asked: Where does life […]
More Than Food: How Farming and Animals First Revealed the Rules of Inheritance
As humans transitioned from nomadic wanderers to cultivating the land and tending herds, they engaged with unintentional experiments. You might envision fields of early grains swaying in the breeze or small flocks of the first […]
Biology 101: Our Earliest Steps in Understanding Life
Let’s think back for a minute. Way back. Not just to how people take things for granted nowadays, but to a time when humans first looked around at the world and tried to make sense […]