Designed as a short series of articles to gently introduce you to concepts and theories you may be unfamiliar with

Everybody has heard of DNA but do you know how it works? How the information in your genes is accessed or encoded? Cue picture of the double helix….

Most people know of proteins in the nutritional sense. When the word protein is used, often a mental image of joint of roast beef or a full cheese board springs to mind. However, for scientists that study proteins, they think of something much less appetising, this is what they see…

Genetic editing sounds like something straight out of science fiction but the truth is that humans have been genetically editing organisms from the moment we first cultivated crops and domesticated animals. Before we could make direct edits to the genome of an organism this genetic engineering would come in the form of selective breeding. No-one at the time would have realised that it was the genetic code that was being altered, all they would have seen was effect on the organism as a whole. This is because our genetic code fuels both variation and uniformity, it underlies some differences seen in people but separates humans from dogs, cats and other animals.   

In the minds of most people Evolution and Charles Darwin will forever go hand in hand, and quite right too, he came up with the idea of evolution by means of natural selection. However, he did not come up with the idea of evolution itself. A prime example of this is Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, he had the words  E conchis omnia emblazoned on to the side of his carriage beneath the family crest of three seashells, it means ‘Everything from seashells’. Over the years many people grappled with the problem of evolution including Gregor Mendel with his pea experiment, Hugo de Vries with his evening primrose mutations and Charles Darwin with his finches and their bill shapes. This leads us to the two main questions of this article – What do we mean by evolution? And what did Darwin bring to the table? 

Just as atoms can be described as the building blocks of chemistry, cells could be referred to as the building blocks of life, they are certainly the building blocks of complex life. You may think that anything so small could not have much variety, after all the majority of biological molecules are based off just four elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, with the occasional use of sulphur and phosphorus thrown in for good measure. However, using only these elements the average human cell can produce up to 100,000 different proteins. It really is miraculous how so few building blocks can create something so complex and beautiful. So, what exactly is a cell? Why is there so much variety? And how do we classify them?