What is gene? How does it have the ability to take stuff like diseases from one person to another?
In: Biology
In ELI5 fashion, imagine taking a long piece of paper and tearing off a thin strip. Then writing some instructions one word at a time.
Each individual word is a **gene**. Describing a single function of your body.
The whole list of instructions would be **DNA**.
When read from top to bottom, they describe how to make and maintain a single human organism. And it gets copied over and over, millions of times over the course of your life. And followed by every cell (if it’s functioning properly).
Imagine that, during all that copying, one of those words is accidently smudged so that it can’t be read properly. And subsequently the body doesn’t quite know how to read that line. It may produce, would could be identified as, **a genetic disorder.** Where some important function is impaired, due to some genes being improperly recorded.
This is what’s exciting about gene therapy.
As our understanding advances, and we get better at being able to target specific genes, we may be able to eradicate errors that have caused misery for generations – such as Hemophilia or Leukemia.
A gene is your body’s photocopy of instructions on how to make you. Sometimes the instructions say to do things wrong (like make a disease) and sometimes the photocopiers smudges the instructions and things get made incorrectly.
Genes encode for proteins. (They do other things as well.) There are around 30,000 genes in a human “genome”, and they way the genes interact to make and maintain a human body is incredibly complex.
We sometimes say that there’s s gene “for” something (eye-colour, or a particular feature or disease). This is a huge and misleading simplification. We might know that a particular gene is associated with some feature, but the gene itself just makes protein; the feature (eye-colour etc.) is the result of complex interactions of multiple genes.
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