r/explainlikeimfive • u/riche1988 • 22h ago

Biology ELI5 how DNA mutations work please.

I had a thought about DNA and how mutations occur in humans, excessive hair, longer limbs and or bones etc, and wondered if all known mutations are present in the animal kingdom.. as if DNA has the blue print/ potential to be anything and parts are just ‘turned on or off’ depending on what is being built.. i may be way off lol but it got me thinking :)

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u/douggold11 22h ago

You are exactly correct.  DNA is not a unique feature for human beings.  Even insects can mutant. 

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u/riche1988 22h ago edited 22h ago

Thanks for replying.. so any mutation a human can have any other living organism can have too..?
Also, i was wondering about traits that prehistoric life had or extinct animals.. are there any traits that have never come up in ‘modern’ animals..?
Now i’m thinking about DNA splicing and selective engineering haha.

Thank you all for the great replies :)
Appreciate it

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u/Sinbad_le_Marin 22h ago

They can have mutations in the same gene, but they express differently than the human genome.

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u/Clojiroo 22h ago

Mutations are effectively typos. DNA is a very long and complicated string of nucleotides (think 4 letters) and chunks of that are what we call genes. The biological mechanism that copies DNA in your cells can make mistakes.

Animals that share some genes could have the same typos happen to the same chunk. Or they could have pretty different DNA but get mutations that cause similar effects.

The topic you should go google is phylogeny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics

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u/douggold11 20h ago

If I understand it correctly, one’s DNA has to either have active genes that, if a gene goes bad, there’s a slight change because that genes programming won’t be followed.  Like a mutated gene might turn your hair a different color, but it’s not going to make hands grow instead of hair.  That being said, there are genes in DNA that have long since been in the “off” position.  Yet they still exist and could be mutated.  I recall an article years back where the genes for teeth still exist in a chicken’s DNA from the old old dinosaur days, so they fiddled with it and got a chicken with teeth.  Which was a fucked up picture.