Genetik
9 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- Almost every supermarket banana is a clone.
The Cavendish variety is seedless and sterile; every plant is a cutting from the same genetic line. Until the 1950s the …
- Elephants carry 20 copies of a cancer-guard gene. You have one.
More cells, more divisions, more cancer, that is how it should go. Yet elephants with a hundred times your cell count …
- Every cell holds two meters of thread.
Your genome has about 3.1 billion base pairs. Stretched out, the DNA of a single cell would run roughly two meters …
- Roughly one man in twelve mixes up red and green.
Red-green colour blindness affects about 8 percent of men and around 0.5 percent of women of Northern European descent. …
- The largest gene family in your genome works in your nose.
Humans have around 400 functional olfactory receptor genes plus some 600 switched-off copies. Mice have roughly 1,400 …
- The red face after one drink is an enzyme question.
Alcohol breaks down in two steps: alcohol dehydrogenase turns it into acetaldehyde, aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 turns that …
- Tolerating milk as an adult is the exception, not the rule.
Worldwide, most people lose the ability to split lactose after weaning – that is the ancestral mammalian state. The …
- You have fewer genes than a rice plant.
Humans carry only about 20,000 protein-coding genes. Before the Human Genome Project, estimates ran to 100,000. Rice …
- Your body has antibodies for pathogens that don't exist yet.
Your genome holds only about 20,000 genes, yet your immune system can produce more than 10 billion different …