Thursday, August 11, 2011

EVERYONE;;Pretend im 5 years old, and explain DNA Reproduction! HELP!?

Okay. The information-coding bits of DNA come in four flavors (nucleotides): adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Think of these like four different shapes of jigsaw-puzzle pieces. When DNA is going to replicate, a special enzyme makes the two sides of the DNA helix (it looks kind of like a ladder) "unzip" just like a zipper, and free-floating nucleotides come and attach to each little piece of A, C, G, and T on each side. The way the puzzle-pieces interlock is that A and T fit together, and C and G fit together. So, the two sides of the DNA ladder separate, and each little A gets a new T attached to it, each C gets a new G, and so on. Once every nucleotide has a new partner, it re-completes the missing half of the ladder on each side, so now you have two ladders instead of one.

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