Hey, welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and this is Short Stuff, The Mysteries of Genetic Mutations Edition.
That's right, because we're gonna talk about the X Men.
Yeah, a mutation. I mean, I don't know if it would help you join x men, But there are mutations that alter people, sometimes in positive ways. We usually associated with negative stuff, like a congenital disease or something. A lot of them are neutral, I think actually the vast majority are neutral. They don't really have any noticeable effect. Some are beneficial. Lactose intolerance, immunity to malaria, when someone's vestigial tale turns into a glorious full tale. Those are
all beneficial genetic mutations. But all of them share something in common, and that is that the replication of the person's genome had some sort of error while it was being copied.
Is lactose intolerance a beneficial No lactose tolerance, I think I thought you said intolerance.
Oh, I'm sorry, Yeah, So lactose intolerance is apparently the base line the default lactose tolerance is from a genetic mutation.
All right, well, let's get into this. Let's talk about DNA or deoxy riboonucleic acid as we all like to call it, such a great word around the campfire. That's a molecule that's going to carry genetic material almost said mutation when you're developing as a as a future human.
And structurally, I think we've all seen the If you've seen Jurassic Park, you've seen what these double this double helix looks like it's a long molecule comprised of nucleotides and there been you know, there's two strands to that coil that formed the double helix that kind of wind around each other. And that's that's what the DNA, the full DNA what would you call it, just molecule looks.
Like the genome. Yeah, the molecule DNA is a molecule. Yeah, and you said it man, it is long. Apparently if you stretched it out, it would be about two meters or six feet tall, if you could figure out how to stretch it out. It's amazing. And it's made of three point one billion base pairs of nucleotides, thymine, cytosine, guanine, and adenine, and adenine goes with thymine, and cytosine goes
with guanine and you put all that together. Just with those combinations, you have a a galaxy of different code that's embedded into the DNA that serves as how like, it tells the rest of your body, each cell what it's supposed to do and how to do it. And usually that has to do with expressing proteins.
Yeah, and you know, like you mentioned, as the cells divide and the DNA is making copies of itself, there might be errors here and there, and that's where those mutations come from. And then if they're in the egg and sperm cells, that those are going to be passed on to the next generation. So that's a genetic mutation that's going to carry on and cause disease or genetic disorders. You can also have what's called a somatic mutation, and that only affects you. It's not inherited by your future.
Kids, right exactly. So really the big problem is genes, like a gene not being replicated correctly, and a gene is just a stretch of nucleotide base pairs along your genome that together shows how to encode a protein. It's
the instructions to how to do a specific thing. And again it's just a segment along your DNA, and when that stuff gets copied, if there's any kind of error, like say you match up an AD nine to a cytosine, it's going to prevent that cellular process that whatever the gene is telling the cell to do to not be able to be performed correctly, hence some mutation.
Yeah, and our cells are constantly copying themselves, either replacing old cells or damage cells. And when that happens, when they're doing that copy, that double stranded DNA is going to split into the two parts and each strand is copied on its own and then they come back together. And when that happens, there can be errors. The good news is it's approximately one in every one hundred million replications this happens. So that's a you know, that's a
pretty good statistic to have in your hip pocket. The other good news is DNA knows what it's doing, so it generally knows when an error happens, and they try to and often can repair and correct that before any problems arise.
Yes, I think that's a pretty good place to take a break, Chuck. So let's take a break, Chuck.
Let's do it.
Shot shot.
Okay. So there's basically two ways that you can that a genetic mutation can develop, the cell replication, which we've talked a lot about, and then environmental influences. And there's actually different ways that can happen. Even during cell replication. There's tautumeric shifts, which is where the nucleotide itself undergoes a quick chemical reaction to where suddenly adnine turns into I don't know, silver just for a second and then
it eventually turns back. But if that if that adnine nucleotide is being copied at that moment, you're going to have a silver nucleotide in your DNA.
Yeah.
Silver just don't work when it comes to making proteins.
Yeah, so that's sort of due to bad timing. Another thing that can happen as far as those errors go, it's called mispairing. And was this a house Off Works article?
Yes, it was.
Yeah, they did a pretty good job of putting this in terms we could understand. If you imagine those two DNA strands that work together are zipped together like a zipper. Sometimes that zipper doesn't.
Align and get stuck in it.
Oh my god, And that can happen when the DNA is getting zipped back up, and that can cause parts of it to be skipped over or maybe something added that shouldn't be right.
And then the third way that a mutation can happen during replication is what's called jumping genes cousins of jumping jacks, and that is where so these genes are normally I don't understand this fully, but gene which again are just stretches of code on your DNA, can actually move. They
can change positions, they can change places. Sometimes they replicate themselves, and the replicant goes and embeds itself in another segment of your DNA, And if it does so in a gene another gene, then it's going to mess up that gene's ability to perform its function. Did not know that that was a thing.
Did not either, had never heard of jumping genes. I've heard of jumping beans and jumping jacks, but never jumping genes.
Very nice. So that's the.
Ways that can happen. As far as like an error occurring in your body on a cellular level, you mentioned external factors. One of the big ones, and I didn't know to this extent even is radiation and you might be thinking like, yeah, so you just don't get X rayed when you're pregnant, like that solves everything, right, That's not necessarily a case, because UV radiation can be a very big cause of mutations, specifically when it's called like
a sunburn on your DNA. If you have too much UV radiation, you can they can form something called how would you say.
That, I'm going to say perimidin dimers.
Perimeding dimers, And I looked, I was.
Like, is that a misprint? Is it supposed to be dimmers? And Nope.
Now it's dimers and especially diming dimers that can distort that DNA structure. And that's sort of like a sunburn on the DNA, and that happens when a couple of DNA building blocks are stuck together, and that's oftentimes caused from you know, sun exposure.
Yeah, there's also chemical factors too, which are basically biological or environmental factors. Essentially, what it is is there's different kinds of chemicals that can make their way into the DNA in the nucleus of a cell and just mess with it. Sometimes they nucleotides and they get pulled in like like just some guy walking down the street getting pulled into the Jimmy Fallon Late Night Show because they
couldn't get enough people to fill seats. That can happen during DNA reproduction replication, and when that nucleotide that didn't mean to be there gets entered into that the new code of DNA again, problems arise. That's a mutation.
The problems arise when they have to sit there and watch Jimmy Fallon. Oh man, boy, I'm gonna hear it. They're also biological factors like a virus can cause that can get in the DNA and that can lead to mutations. And then there's some other environmental stuff as well, right, yeah.
De animating agents they actually remove parts of our DNA. Substances like stuff found in cigarette smoke can stick to the DNA like so much tar and change the shape of the DNA. Essentially, you don't want anything going anywhere near your DNA. And if there's something that happens, and it happens on an important gene, that mutation is going to produce some sort of problems down the line. But our body is actually really really good at either preventing
these errors or correcting them. When it finds them, which is just mind boggling to me.
Yeah, it's super cool that our body can do this. Sometimes it's like it's called a direct fix and these are these are just small little errors. Like they likened it to a road crack, and they also likened it to just a quick patch on that road. The cell just directly fixes it super quick.
Like yeah, and we should say the cell the Yeah, the cell that's transcribing the DNA is aware of it because there are different different molecules that proofread the newly created DNA to make sure it matches the original.
Amazing.
Yeah, it is. So if they find a mismatch, if they find just some stretch it could be big, small, whatever, they'll actually cut it out excision. They'll digest it and then they'll reproduce the correct version of it and then connect it to that part that they cut out of the DNA and then zip it together.
And if it's if a whole section of DNA gets damaged, they can go to another DNA strand and say, hey, I'm glad you're here because we're gonna use you now to come fix this other strand.
Yeah, thank god you're here. They were about to pull us into Jimmy Fallon and we needed something to do.
That's a off said thing in my house. Thank God I was here because I know we mentioned one of the roses the movie How It Holds Up. That's one of the great lines from one of the roses when they are separated, but Michael Douglas is still in the house and the Christmas tree catches fire and he runs downstairs and puts it out and screams, thank god I was here. And I say that a lot, and just whenever anything dumb happens that I saw for the Face family, I go, thank god I was here.
That's great. That's a great thing. Man Chuck. Everybody loves Chuck for reasons like that.
Not everybody, just like Raymond.
All those people can go soak their heads.
Oh okay, thank you.
Well, since I think we're out of stuff to talk about, short stuff is out.
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