Probably this is a stupid question or has been asked here before, but I wanted to understand how heredity works.
Let’s say someone develops diabetes or hypertension only get their baby is born, then in that case how does, if their child too develops it later in their life, is it linked to heredity?
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That’s a hugely broad question (and you may want to edit the second part for clarity).
First off, someone developing a disease and their child also developing that disease later on, doesn’t necessarily mean the disease was inherited. Diabetes (type 2) and hypertension in particular can result from loads of environmental factors, like poor diet.
But let’s say the disease *(or an increased chance to develop it in combination with other factors)* is hereditary. For something to be hereditary, it must be in our genome — our collective genetic information encoded in DNA — because that’s what we actually pass on to our children. That information is divided over about 25,000 protein-coding genes and a bunch more non-coding stuff where the function is less clear. As the name implies, protein-coding genes encode proteins and can be read to produce those proteins, and proteins are the tools that cells use to do basically anything.
So, if the DNA coding for a particular protein is changed in a way that makes the protein less/not functional, and that DNA makes it into your child (as egg or sperm), then the change is hereditary.
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