Sorry if this doesn’t make sense or is dumb
So to my understanding, your dna contains all of the code for how your phenotypes are expressed, including in your skin of course. Like where moles/birthmarks go, and for animals, how different fur colors manifest. Pigment and stuff is programmed to go to specific areas and things like that
But how much data is there? Because if someone gains a lot of weight, they also gain a lot of new skin. Does your dna just have an endless pattern for what features your skin will have? Or when an animal is really overweight, how does the dna just keep on generating a fur pattern indefinitely? I can understand when it comes to skin how maybe moles and things are a separate manifestation, but to my knowledge fur color is very tied to pigment sources placed in a pattern. It’s not random, because the colors are never just scattered without reason. But how does it decide in what manner to continue the pattern? Of course DNA is a finite thing, so does it eventually just loop back around? A repeating pattern, reusing data?
Sorry if I’m totally misunderstanding how this works lol
In: Biology
>So to my understanding, your dna contains all of the code for how your phenotypes are expressed, including in your skin of course. Like where moles/birthmarks go, and for animals, how different fur colors manifest. Pigment and stuff is programmed to go to specific areas and things like that
DNA simply encodes proteins (we’ll just skip over the can of worms that is noncoding DNA), which is to say, strictly the instructions to make them. **There is no information in there dictating the fate of proteins after they are produced.**
I get the feeling you’re approaching this from a computer/code analogy sort of view, so consider it this way. Every protein-coding stretch of DNA (gene) is like a constructor function. When the function is triggered, an instance of its object product is made (DNA is transcribed into RNA and RNA is translated into protein). These objects (proteins) can actually *do* stuff during runtime of our program (life of the cell). There are also objects (transcription factors) that control the triggering of particular sets of constructor functions. Overall, all the complex outcomes of our program at runtime is a result of the interactions between these objects; it’s classic [emergent behavior](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence). And on top of that, every single cell has a *complete set of constructor functions (genome)* and starts off with some running objects the mother cell it divided from.
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