These genes can match up in many ways to make different combinations. This is why many family members look a lot alike and others don’t look like each other at all. Genes can also increase the risk in a family for getting certain health conditions. Families also share habits, diet, and environment.

They can benefit individuals, couples and families who have genetic concerns such as:

• Family history of cancer.
• Family history of diseases that can be hereditary (e.g., cancer, heart problems, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease)

Heredity is the transmission of genetic characteristics from parents to offspring and is often referred to as genetics. Inheritance depicts the pathway of the genetic traits and its expression from one to another generation.

about 3 meters

Let’s say each human has around 10 trillion cells (this is actually a low ball estimate). This would mean that each person has around 60 trillion feet or around 10 billion miles of DNA inside of them. The Earth is about 93 million miles away from the sun. So your DNA could stretch to the sun and back 61 times.

You have about 10 trillion cells in your body, so if you stretched the DNA in all the cells out, end to end, they’d stretch over 744 million miles. The moon is only about 250,000 miles away, so all your DNA would stretch to the moon and back alomst 1500 times.

The average person’s body contains enough DNA to stretch from the Sun to Pluto, and back — 17 times. DNA molecules are 1.7 to 8.5 cm long when uncoiled — about 5 cm on average.

But if you took all the blood vessels out of an average child and laid them out in one line, the line would stretch over 60,000 miles. An adult’s would be closer to 100,000 miles long. There are three kinds of blood vessels: arteries, veins, and capillaries.

The DNA molecule is a double helix: that is, two long, thin strands twisted around each other like a spiral staircase. The sides are sugar and phosphate molecules. The rungs are pairs of chemicals called ‘nitrogenous bases’, or ‘bases’ for short.

In the nucleus of each cell, the DNA molecule is packaged into thread-like structures called chromosomes. Each chromosome is made up of DNA tightly coiled many times around proteins called histones that support its structure. DNA and histone proteins are packaged into structures called chromosomes.

genetic Having to do with chromosomes, DNA and the genes contained within DNA. So with 23 pairs of human chromosomes, every human cell should host 46 strands of DNA — each wrapped around hundreds of thousands of histones. This tight coiling helps the body to pack its long DNA molecules into very tiny spaces.

deoxyribose

Both DNA and RNA are built with a sugar backbone, but whereas the sugar in DNA is called deoxyribose (left in image), the sugar in RNA is called simply ribose (right in image).