What is genetics? What is the role of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in the cellular flow of information?

Have you ever wondered how the information stored in your DNA actually becomes the proteins that make your body work? In this lesson, we'll explore the cellular flow of information. This process, often called the central dogma of molecular biology, is the foundation for understanding how cells function, how mutations can lead to disease, and how new treatments are developed. Let's dive into how information flows from DNA to RNA to protein, and why it's essential in understanding diseases like cancer.

What is genetics? So genetics is basically the study of your genes. And your genes are organized as units of this DNA. So DNA is this genetic material in the nucleus. Now DNA doesn't just float around. It's actually organized very, very tightly. And the organization of that DNA is that it's wound up really tightly into these units called chromosomes. So in general, when we're talking about genetics, we're talking about different levels that we can look at—genetic material, from the four base pairs at the DNA molecule; those molecules are enormous. And they kind of get wound up and bound up into these large structures of chromosomes.

And so you can have alterations at any level, whether from the individual base pair all the way to something broad at the chromosomal level. What is the cellular flow of information, or the central dogma? Let's think about the cellular flow of information. I have a diagram here of a cell, and in this picture, I have diagramed the nucleus of the cell that contains a computer. Well, the computer is basically the code that dictates what that cell does—the function of that cell. And that code is the DNA.

That DNA is genetic material that is inherited from your mother and father. So you are actually a hybrid of mom and dad, making you an individual, a unique individual, just like mom and dad were unique individuals made up of DNA from their mother and father. So a lot of what we try to understand in genetics is what are the contributing sequences that mom and dad may contribute to an individual to make them unique, that gives them unique traits.

Those traits are the color of your hair, the color of your eyes, what you look like. That's easy to understand. That component of genetics—because if you sit in a room of a lot of people, you look around, you all look different—and you look different because you inherited different genes and genetic information from different parents. And so what you look like on the outside makes you individual, unique. And I'm simply extending that to the inside. What you look like on the inside, what every individual cell looks like, what every individual myeloma looks like, is individual and unique based on the genetic information that's coding for the function of that cell.

That DNA is transcribed from the code into a molecule called RNA, and that RNA is then translated in the cell into proteins—call them the factories of the cell. And you can imagine that the genetic changes that might occur may affect the amount of RNA that's produced. It may affect the structure of the factory. Maybe you make a factory that has an extra smokestack so that your factory is producing more protein that causes cells to divide more frequently. That would be worth knowing. On the other hand, you may have a factory that fails to put on the brakes so that the cells don't break and stop dividing.

So anything that happens at the DNA can impact the factory or the functions of a cell because that's where it's all coded. So trying to understand that genetic information and the concept of that genetic information on the function of the cell becomes really important to understand this disease.

So now you've seen how information flows from DNA to RNA to protein. Sometimes mistakes, called mutations, may occur during this process. Mutations can affect cell function and why it matters in diseases like myeloma. By following these molecular instructions, scientists can develop targeted treatments and improve patient care. Thanks for watching and keep exploring. The story of your cells is always evolving.