I have been wandering, does DNA play any role in our body after we are born? When cellular division takes place in an embrion everything is established based on the DNA instructions (like for instance how the stem cell specialization should be occurring) but what about the processes that follow after that, all the activity that begins to happen in the mature body, does DNA has any influence on that?
DNA role
People can have a genetic predisposition to certain diseases and conditions that happen later in life. Examples range from heart disease to baldness.
DNA is used by every cell every day to make proteins necessary for ongoing life. Look into the DNA-RNA transcription mechanism, it's quite cool!
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Thats surprising. When a stem cell becomes a specialized cell does the new identity get saved somewhere? How does a cell know what it is? How does a liver cell know it`s a liver not a lung cell. Is the cell type just a unique physical/chemical arrangement of its elements that when cell division takes place gets blindly duplicated or is the cell `type` saved somewhere as code and referred to later? If it`s the former that means that defects/errors occurring in one cell would get replicated down the line in new generations of cells. Or is there a lock on a predetermined DNA sequence (that speaks about/describes the cell type) that each cell has which gets inherited from generation to generation since the moment specialization has occurred, a lock that acts as the cell`s database/storage medium for its identity.
hplus0603 said:
Look into the DNA-RNA transcription mechanism, it's quite cool!
Understanding articles of this nature without posesing a medical background can be a challenge/mount as a steep learning curve.
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Some Covid vaccines will modify the cell RNA, does it do this to the RNA of every single cell in the body or just to a distinct type of cells?
This is a difficult and interesting topic. First yes, DNA and the Blueprint RNA is always used in your body 24/7. DNA controls how substances are created which then have impact to all the processes running all the time. If you change your DNA by a therapie or a virus, it has immediate effect on your life. This is for example a cause of radiation sickness when gamma aprticles clash with the DNA or RNA and the cell is altered this way.
Most of the time, an alteration of the DNA leads to death of the cell because the processes happening in the cell are changed up to totally stopped. But also DNA as a termination date which is determined by the telomeres, distinctive structures found at the ends of our chromosomes. They prevent the DNA from frazzling which leads to errors in copying and the disfunction of the DNA. The cause why we get old and die (along a million other reasons)
The program of a cell is determined by different causes, first and foremost substances like hormones and proteins which take part when we grow in our mother's body and second there are also cells which are just plain, so they can become every kind of cell depending on it's neighbours. Such a cell put near a heart will become part of the heart as well, same for bones. And yes, you're right, defects will become part of every new cell the old one splits into as it is always a copy paste process. Again, the reason why people die from radiation or COVID.
The “memory” of a cell is it's RNA, the blueprint of the DNA. DNA is created all the time from RNA and then split into halfs and so copied. DNA is made of base pairs where each base can only have a single partner, that's why this works more or less well.
What viruses do and of course the same mechanism is used by the mRNA vaccines currently present, is to get itself into the cell and near to the core override the cell ‘memory’ with it's own RNA aka the Blueprint. The cell will then immediately start updating it's DNA and run the Program. The program is just a simple copy paste ‘Script’ to have the cell create new virusses. All other processes of the cell are stopped, so the process is consuming all available energy until the core is out of material and the new virusses are breaking into the body and infecting more cells. The COVID vaccine does basically the same but instead of viruses, the cell just creates a COVID typical protein which should tell your body to create antigens against them.
Proteins are interesting little things; did you know that each cell in your body has proteins which simply move straight forward or some that detect junk (and virusses) and eat them up?
It btw. doesn't matter what type of cell you have, think of them as if you have a smartphone, you can install everything on it as long as it knows the hardware, or simply isn't usable anymore (dead).
There is btw. an interesting publication of a group analysing 244.000 COVID studies with the help of machine learning. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.695139/full
Without getting into the pro- or con vaccination discussion (which I don't want to be part of), it turns out that if the data is correct, COVID and of course other virus infections are affected by your bloodglucose level. So a low level person is less likely to be infected and/or have lethal damage up to death than a high level person
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Shaarigan said:
All other processes of the cell are stopped, so the process is consuming all available energy until the core is out of material and the new virusses are breaking into the body and infecting more cells.
So the cell is basically a chemical factory taking in raw material and producing cell body parts needed for a cell split. It also produces other products depending what organ the cell is part of. The blood is just the conveyer belt by which everyone receives the raw materials and a dumping place for things manufactured. I can get that. I`m just a little confused about how the diversification is taking place. You just start from just one cell (the first embrio cell) and end up with a body and organs with a distinctive shape. How do you get different cells end up in the predefined parts of the body and form organs with a particular shape.
I was also imagining how the body transforms slice by slice into viruses and asked myself how much transformation does it take to cause you to die. Now I know you don`t get to see a hand or some other part of your body vanish. It doesn`t take much to make one of your organs to stop functioning and cause your death.
Like I wrote, this is
- Already contained in the DNA
- Affected by Hormones and Proteines
- Affected by other Cells surrounding
Pregnancy is simply spoken hormone armageddon, an exchange happens between mother and child all the time and hormones from the mother are affecting the baby growing but also the cells which are already there after the process started, is creating a lot of different substances which all have effect on the growing child.
Our cells are always mutating, bad mutations are supposed to die while most are just some side effects. DNA mutation happens as an error ratio in the splitting process. Sometimes base pairs don't match and so the DNA is adding some more pairs or shifting the DNA until it matches or removing some base pairs. This is how evolution happens and a million years brought some randomly creations which leaded to how we look today.
As you might already now, a child is made of half the DNA of mother and father
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I think I figured it there are different stages in the development body. The first stage is when the trunk and branches are formed, this stage defines the physical outline of the human body(this is when the skeleton cells of the overall body and the skeleton/support of each individual organ are formed), in a different stage the worker cells develop they grow like leaves on the tree branches. So it`s really the formation of the structure cells where all the magic happens.
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