very confused as to what DNA is, and have no technical expertise to understand detailed articles! Is DNA something you can look at under a microscope or what?
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DNA is just a special kind of polymer that is contained in your cells. A polymer is a chain of molecules that are stable on their own, (monomers) but which are also stable attached to themselves in a chain (polymers). There are all kinds of polymers in your fmday to day life. Almost all plastics for example. Polyurethane and epoxy resins are both examples of taking a liquid made of many monsters that aren’t connected yet, adding a catalyst to speed up the connecting process, and then making the liquid into a shape before all the connecting polymers form and make it solid.
DNA is a special kind of polymer where instead of being the same monomer repeated over and over again, there are four different possibilities. The order in which these four substituent monomers occur is how DNA stores information. Usually, in patterns of three.
There are special indicator chemicals which you can apply to test samples, which react with DNA without altering its structure. There’s a LOT of very chemistry involved, but, essentially, the mechanism is very similar to how proteins are folded. Essentially, it balls the DNA up very tightly, and makes it possible to encapsulate the DNA strand. The indicator chemicals are also combined with other special chemicals that are used to cause the DNA and the indicator to be able to dissolve into a solution that leaves everything else behind. So, you essentially are washing the DNA off with a social chemical that only washes away DNA.
Then, the DNA sample is separated from everything else and can be examined using other techniques like genome mapping or gram staining. Obviously, the DNA is severely damaged but if you know the “rules” for how the DNA syntax works, you can look at the surrounding information for a section of DNA and determine what a small missing piece is based on whether or not it makes sense for anything else to be there. Remember what I said about chunks of three? While there are technically 64 unique combinations of 4 things three times, only about 30 of them get used, and often if you know two of them, there are only one and rarely two other possibilities for the third.
There are all kinds of fascinating techniques for figuring out what the missing parts of a DNA strand are
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