Question: what makes dna so special to each individual person? what made you decide to look into dna? what is dna whats it made of?

Lilian Hunt answered on 19 Mar 2014:

Or DNA is our genetic code. It’s kind of like a book and reading it tells us why we are born as we are. It’s so special to each individual person because we get our DNA half from our mums and half from our dad. They will have got theirs half and half from their parents. Their parents will have got theirs half and half from their parents and so on… So our DNA not only tells us about us, but it also tells us about where our families come from. It shows us our past and predicts our future, like how we will grow old. On top of that we have our own unique differences. We get random mutations as we develop before we are born and even get more of these mutations in life. These are unique to us and not found in our parents so it add our own stamp to our DNA. Our DNA is a complex book, so far we can read the bits that we call genes but there’s still a lot that we don’t understand – like chapters that seem to be written in a language we don’t know yet. But we’re working on it! I’m looking at these bits of DNA between the genes and some of it seems important too! I decided to look at DNA and genetics because it is the core of us. I love the idea of it being like a code to decipher and understanding it could help so many people 🙂

You may have seen pictures of DNA as a ‘double helix’ – a twisted ladder type structure. There are two strands of DNA running alongside each other in opposite directions. Their backbones are made of sugar and phosphates and the bits linking the two backbones are the bases. They look like the rungs of the ladder. They are made of one of 4 molecules: Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine and Thymine. It’s easier to explain it with a picture so have a look at this one:

It’s crazy to think that this is why we are who we are, the order of the bases along millions of base pairs is our genetic code! 🙂