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Produced by the Office of Communications and Public Liaison National Institute of General Medical Sciences National Institutes of Health U.S. Department of Health and Human Services The New Genetics NIH Publication No.10 ­ 662 Revised April 2010 http://www.nigms.nih.gov Contents FOREWORD 2 CHAPTER 1: HOW GENES WORK 4 Beautiful DNA 5 Copycat 8 Let’s Call It Even 9 Getting the Message 11 Nature’s Cut­and­Paste Job 14 All Together Now 16 Genetics and You: Nursery Genetics 17 Found in Translation 18 RNA Surprises 19 An Interesting Development 20 The Tools of Genetics: Mighty Microarrays 22 CHAPTER 2: RNA AND DNA REVEALED: NEW ROLES, NEW RULES 24 RNA World 25 Molecular Editor 26 Healthy Interference 29 Dynamic DNA 30 Secret Code 30 Genetics and You: The Genetics of Anticipation 32 Battle of the Sexes 33 Starting at the End 34 The Other Human Genome 36 The Tools of Genetics: Recombinant DNA and Cloning 38 CHAPTER 3: LIFE’S GENETIC TREE 40 Everything Evolves 40 Selective Study 42 Clues from Variation 43 Living Laboratories 46 The Genome Zoo 52 Genes Meet Environment 53 Genetics and You: You’ve Got Rhythm! 56 Animals Helping People 58 My Collaborator Is a Computer 58 The Tools of Genetics: Unlimited DNA 60 CHAPTER 4: GENES ARE US 62 Individualized Prescriptions 64 The Healing Power of DNA 65 Cause and Effect 67 Us vs. Them 68 Genetics and You: Eat Less, Live Longer? 69 Gang Warfare 70 The Tools of Genetics: Mathematics and Medicine 72 CHAPTER 5: 21ST­CENTURY GENETICS 74 No Lab? No Problem! 76 Hard Questions 78 Good Advice 80 Genetics and You: Crime­Fighting DNA 81 Genetics, Business, and the Law 82 Careers in Genetics 85 The Tools of Genetics: Informatics and Databases 86 GLOSSARY 88 Foreword And every living thing Consider just three of Earth’s inhabitants: does one thing the same a bright yellow daffodil that greets the way: To make more of itself, it first copies its spring, the single­celled creature called molecular instruction manual—its genes—and then passes this infor­ Thermococcus that lives in boiling hot mation on to its offspring. This cycle has been springs, and you. Even a science­fiction repeated for three and a half billion years. But how did we and our very distant rela­ writer inventing a story set on a distant tives come to look so different and develop so many different ways of getting along in the planet could hardly imagine three more dif­ world? A century ago, researchers began to answer ferent forms of life. Yet you, Thermococcus that question with the help of a science called genetics. Get a refresher course on the basics in and the daffodil are related! Indeed, all of Chapter 1, “How Genes Work.” It’s likely that when you think of heredity the Earth’s billions of living things are kin you think first of DNA, but in the past few years, to each other. researchers have made surprising findings about The New Genetics I Foreword 3 another molecular actor that plays a starring role. Can DNA and RNA help doctors predict Check out the modern view of RNA in Chapter 2, whether we’ll get diseases like cancer, diabetes or “RNA and DNA Revealed: New Roles, New Rules.” asthma? What other mysteries are locked within When genetics first started, scientists didn’t the 6 feet of DNA inside nearly every cell in our have the tools they have today. They could only bodies? Chapter 4, “Genes Are Us,” explains what look at one gene, or a few genes, at a time. Now, researchers know, and what they are still learning, researchers can examine all of the genes in a liv­ about the role of genes in health and disease. ing organism—its genome—at once. They are Finally, in Chapter 5, “21st­Century doing this for organisms on every branch of the Genetics,” see a preview of things to come. Learn tree of life and finding that the genomes of mice, how medicine and science are changing in big frogs, fish and a slew of other creatures have ways, and how these changes influence society. many genes similar to our own. From metabolism to medicines to agriculture, So why doesn’t your brother look like your the science of genetics affects us every day. It is dog or the fish in your aquarium? It’s because of part of life … part of your life! evolution. In Chapter 3, “Life’s Genetic Tree,” find out how evolution works and how it relates to genetics and medical research. C H A P T E R 1 How Genes Work eople have known for many years that Proteins do many other things, too. They Pliving things inherit traits from their parents. provide the body’s main building materials, That common­sense observation led to agricul­ forming the cell’s architecture and structural ture, the purposeful breeding and cultivation of components. But one thing proteins can’t do is animals and plants for desirable characteristics. make copies of themselves. When a cell needs Firming up the details took quite some time, more proteins, it uses the manufacturing instruc­ though. Researchers did not understand exactly tions coded in DNA. how traits were passed to the next generation The DNA code of a gene—the sequence of until the middle of the 20th century. its individual DNA building blocks, labeled A Now it is clear that genes are what carry our (adenine), T (thymine), C (cytosine) and G traits through generations and that genes are (guanine) and collectively called nucleotides— made of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).