Your DNA is relatively free from mutation
DNA is constantly replicating itself in your cells to grow, which can lead to some errors in replication and recombination, and is also subject to bombardment from environmental factors everyday (such as UV rays or cigarette smoke, which can damage DNA and lead to cancer.) This leads to more than one quintillion DNA changes in one day, and you’re probably asking how you don’t have superpowers already. DNA mutations can be dangerous, and often cause cancer if unchecked by cell mechanisms. The cell checks the replicated DNA 3 times during the cell cycle, and if a problem is discovered, the cell has two courses of action. The first would be to repair the damaged section of DNA by using enzymes. However, if the damage is too extensive, the cell can destroy itself and its defective DNA to prevent the error from spreading throughout the cell. This process is known as apoptosis, and can help insure DNA integrity for the rest …show more content…
Logically, all or almost all of your DNA would serve this purpose. However, the human genome project found that about 98% of DNA is noncoding. This is a misleading number, however. While a huge portion of DNA is noncoding, recent research has shown that some of this noncoding DNA, also called "junk DNA", is used in cell function unlike common DNA. Even if we were to count all of the possibly functional junk DNA with regular DNA, we would still find that, with a modern estimate, nonfunctional DNA makes up at least 85-95% of the human genome. The amount of junk DNA is a genome is useful to researchers, however, as the larger the amount of noncoding DNA in the genome the more complex the organism is. This is because useful traits in DNA may become obsolete as the organism evolves, and thus more evolved organisms will have more junk
DNA is constantly replicating itself in your cells to grow, which can lead to some errors in replication and recombination, and is also subject to bombardment from environmental factors everyday (such as UV rays or cigarette smoke, which can damage DNA and lead to cancer.) This leads to more than one quintillion DNA changes in one day, and you’re probably asking how you don’t have superpowers already. DNA mutations can be dangerous, and often cause cancer if unchecked by cell mechanisms. The cell checks the replicated DNA 3 times during the cell cycle, and if a problem is discovered, the cell has two courses of action. The first would be to repair the damaged section of DNA by using enzymes. However, if the damage is too extensive, the cell can destroy itself and its defective DNA to prevent the error from spreading throughout the cell. This process is known as apoptosis, and can help insure DNA integrity for the rest …show more content…
Logically, all or almost all of your DNA would serve this purpose. However, the human genome project found that about 98% of DNA is noncoding. This is a misleading number, however. While a huge portion of DNA is noncoding, recent research has shown that some of this noncoding DNA, also called "junk DNA", is used in cell function unlike common DNA. Even if we were to count all of the possibly functional junk DNA with regular DNA, we would still find that, with a modern estimate, nonfunctional DNA makes up at least 85-95% of the human genome. The amount of junk DNA is a genome is useful to researchers, however, as the larger the amount of noncoding DNA in the genome the more complex the organism is. This is because useful traits in DNA may become obsolete as the organism evolves, and thus more evolved organisms will have more junk