Genetics

Genetics, a discipline of biology, is the science of heredity and variation in living organisms. The continuity of life depends on the inheritance of biological information in the form of DNA molecules. The research kindled by curiosity about the origin and nature of life, lead to breakthroughs in genetics and cell biology. The discoveries are certainly going to transform medicine and improve our quality of life. Knowledge of the inheritance of characteristics has been implicitly used since prehistoric times for improving crop plants and animals through selective breeding. However, the modern science of genetics, which seeks to understand the mechanisms of inheritance, only began with the work of Gregor Mendel in the mid–1800s. Although he did not know the physical basis for heredity, Mendel observed that inheritance is fundamentally a discrete process with specific traits that are inherited in an independent manner – these basic units of inheritance are now called genes. Following the rediscovery of Mendel’s observations in the early 1900s, research in 1910s yielded the first physical understanding of inheritance – that genes are arranged linearly along large cellular structures called chromosomes. By the 1950s it was understood that the core of a chromosome was a long molecule called DNA and genes existed as linear sections within the molecule. A single strand of DNA is a chain of four types of nucleotides; hereditary information is contained within the sequence of these nucleotides. Solved by Watson and Crick in 1953, DNA's three–dimensional structure is a double–stranded helix, with the nucleotides on each strand complementary to each other. Each strand acts as a template for synthesis of a new partner strand, providing the physical mechanism for the inheritance of information. Find More knowledge base on wonderwhizkids/Genetics