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What is DNA?

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University Course Reader · STEM

Each cell carries a complete copy of the organism's DNA, though only a fraction of it is ever used in that cell.

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Overview

DNA is a long, helically shaped molecule that stores instructions for the development and functioning of an organism. The instructions are written in an alphabet of four chemical letters, and the order of those letters is what carries the information. Nearly all of your cells hold a complete copy, though each one uses only the parts it needs.
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Overview

DNA is a chemical chain holding the instructions for building you, spelled out with four repeating units. Shuffle their order and you get a different creature entirely. Nearly every cell you own carries the complete set, which is a lot of redundancy for something that only ever reads a handful of pages. 😎

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Detail

DNA is a chemical chain built from four kinds of building block, called bases and written A, C, G and T. They are the only part of the chain that varies from one link to the next, so their sequence is the message. A run of that sequence spelling out one usable instruction is called a gene. Almost every gene is an instruction for making one protein, and proteins are what do the physical work in a cell. The DNA never builds anything itself. Reading a gene means copying it, and a messenger molecule called mRNA carries that copy out to where proteins are assembled. The chain is bases from end to end, but only a small share of it spells out genes. Much of the rest controls when genes are read, and a good deal has no known function at all. Which genes get read differs from cell to cell, and that is why identical copies produce skin in one place and muscle in another.
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Detail

DNA spells out how to build you using an alphabet of exactly four characters. Order is everything, the same way cat and act are not the same word despite identical ingredients. A stretch that spells one usable command is a gene, and nearly every gene is an order to build one protein. Proteins do the actual labour, so DNA is management and never workforce. It does not even leave the compartment it sits in to supervise. Only a slice of the whole thing spells commands at all, plenty of the rest is switches deciding when to read them, and a fair chunk nobody has cracked yet. Your skin and your biceps hold the identical set and have wildly different pages open. 😎

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Analogy

DNA works like a reference library that never lends anything out. The shelves hold every instruction the organism might need. When something is required, one page gets copied and the copy is carried out to a workshop, where the object is actually built. The library stays intact, the copy is thrown away afterwards, and two workshops requesting different pages end up making completely different things.
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Analogy

DNA is a family recipe book so precious it is not allowed out of the kitchen, not even for a minute. Want to cook something, you copy out one page by hand and carry the copy to the stove. The book never gets splattered, the copy goes in the bin afterwards, and two cousins working from the very same book can put entirely different dinners on the table. 😎
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AI explanations may contain errors · Not professional advice

Formal definition — The same term, explained the usual way

Deoxyribonucleic acid is a double-stranded polymer in which sequences of four nucleotide bases encode heritable information. Segments corresponding to functional products are termed genes; these are transcribed into messenger RNA and, in the case of protein-coding genes, subsequently translated into polypeptides. The genome is replicated in full during cell division, while differential gene expression accounts for cellular differentiation.

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