ELi5: how can a single fertlized egg/cell produce a full body with so many different cell types? are we talking about extracting a compressed file or making factories which has different products to produce?
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The mechanism you’re looking for is [transcription factors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_factor). Depending on what signals a cell receives from outside, it may transcribe a protein that binds to different sections of DNA, either enhancing or inhibiting transcription of that piece of DNA.
This is an area of research that will probably take decades to fully unravel. We don’t know how many kinds of tissue there are in your body. Thousands? Every one of them has gone through multiple rounds of differentiation. (Except egg cells; obviously they don’t differentiate.)
My favorite example is [FOXP2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOXP2), a gene that’s found in many species, but the human version is unique. We’ve known for a long time that FOXP2 has something to do with our ability to make language, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that we knew how.
I was about to write a bunch of stuff about the history of what we’ve learned about this transcription factor, but the Wikipedia article says it all better than I ever could. This is a *very* deep wiki-hole, so if you’re susceptible to those, be careful. 🙂
Happy learning!
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