Question: what in your opinion is the most interesting thing about genes?

Michaela Livingstone answered on 16 Jun 2010:

The most interesting thing about genes is how they’re packaged up inside the nucleus of a cell. Not only is it done is such a clever way that means something like 6ft of DNA (genes are stretches of teh sequence in your DNA that produce a protein) is wound up to fit in a space that’s a fraction of the width of a human hair (the nucleus is very small), but also plays loads of roles on many processes that control DNA replication, damage repair and when the genes in the DNA get switched on or off to make their proteins. It’s a field called epigenetics and it’s probably how memories are stored and what produces a lot of differences between different people.