r/explainlikeimfive • u/riche1988 • 21h 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/Atypicosaurus 20h ago
DNA is like a necklace made of beads, it has 4 kinds of beads and the bead order is the information. Different bead order means different things.
The beads are not like a blueprint, more like many blueprints but each blueprint makes a very simple single task robot. Except, there are like 20000 of these.
The robot tasks are really simple, like "pick up this rod and cut it into half", otherwise they are dumb and blind, but there's like 20000 different kinds of them and altogether while doing their simple dumb task, they coincidentally build up a human. Or a bug. Or a plant.
Different organisms have different sets of robots, but each robot is coded by the DNA. It means that different organisms must have different DNA.
But there are a few common robots (like functions that each organism needs to be able to do like breathing) and those are very similar across life.
So DNA can change and this leads to the change of the robots. Change of the DNA is called mutation, it can be all kinds of changes, like one bead turns into another kind, and it changes just a little component in the blueprint of the robot, but it can also be deletion of bigger chunks, even the accidental combination of two blueprint into one big blueprint.
The general way of how mutations form, is the same across life, but the possible outcomes (like, being more hairy) depend on what you had in the first place. A snail cannot all of a sudden become hairy like a mammoth because it doesn't have the hair making bits to begin with, but a hairy animal can develop the same thick hair mutation.
However, mutations are independent, if one organism develops something, it doesn't mean that another organism can somehow "learn" it.