I was taking a Biology class today about cloning and DNA. My professor explained that if you made a clone of yourself, it would still be “your DNA age.”
So my question is: why does DNA age?
Will it be possible for humanity to discover a way to make clones that are born with new DNA?
In: Biology
There’s a lot of DNA that doesn’t really encode useful information, but takes up space, known as non-encoding regions.
Telomeres are a specific non-encoding region at the end of strands of DNA whose purpose is to allow things like proteins to attach to DNA. They’re kinda like a protein landing strip.
The attachment process isn’t perfect, which means the telomeres are not perfectly replicated each time and become shorter and shorter each time the strand of DNA is replicated.
Cloning would simply take the existing DNA, so would be about the same “age” as the DNA from which it was cloned.
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