this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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Review of 2023 book: How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology Philip Ball. ISBN9781529095999

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[–] Donjuanme@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm sorry, but this is not computing, if it were you could think of DNA as an old spinning hard drive, sometimes you need to put pieces of data that will end up creating the program you're going to run on different sides of the disc, fragmented memory if you will, you don't need to read everything in a row to make the file, you need 8mb chunks there and there, there are start and stop codons that tell the RNA transcription proteins when to read and when to stop reading, and there are sometimes entire other genes between two sections of DNA that will eventually be "working in the same program". There's no need to read an entire strand of DNA, it's not even done that way when the cells divide, it's actually not possible, except in gamete production, to read the entire strand, because there's a bit of extra (junk, telomeres) that cannot be read and reproduced, your DNA gets shorter every time your cells divide.

Structural similarities are most important (though still negligibly so) in recombination during meiosis, but even then the recombination is happening between strands of DNA of inherently equal lengths.

I believe you're confusing DNA with protein formation when you're saying the structure is important, there are many areas of DNA that have unnecessary lengths of extra codons. If you don't believe this please look at plant genomes, there are some that are thousands of times larger in terms of base pairs, that have hundred times fewer genres.

[–] Cosmicomical@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Thank you for your answer, I will look up those things. Kind of an aside but regarding the dna getting shorter my undertanding was that it only happens when you get older and you don't produce enough telomerase anymore that usually compensates the damage by extending the telomeres so the actual dna is not reduced during duplication.