CELL Basic unit of life, however not all life (e.g. viruses are non-cellular life). Cells are: - Prokaryotes: do NOT have nucleus, only nucleoid. Always form single cell organisms. - Eukaryotes: Have nucleus, can form single or multiple cell organisms. HUMAN GENETICS/DNA: The whole genetic information is called a genome. Each individual has a different genome, which can also differ in size (about 1%). Each cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes in the nucleus, i.e. 46 total (this is called "diploid") plus a small portion of mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) outside the nucleus (16569 pairs, 13 proteins). Chromosomes are physically separated and have an X shape. Each chromosome has its own DNA sequence. All these DNA sequences together form the genome. Ideally all cells in an organism hold the identical copy of genetic information. Every chromosome pair except for the last one (23rd) consists of one chromosome from the mother and one from the father and they have the same "format" (same lengths, location of genes etc.). The 23rd pair is special, it's a "sex" pair: there are two possible chromosome types in this pair: X and Y (smaller), males have X from mother and Y from father, females have two Xs (one from mother and one from father). Each chromosome consists of one long DNA which is subdivided into genes, the basic code units that encode individual proteins. A chromosome contains hundreds to thousands of genes (total number of human genes is not known but it's in tens of thousands). A gene is thousands pairs long. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is a big molecule consisting of 2 long chains forming a double helix shape. It encodes and carries genetic infomration, a "source code" of an organism. DNA is composed of pairs of nucleotides. There can be 5 types of nucleotides in DNA: - A (adenin) - T (thymine) - C (cytosine) - G (guanine) A only pairs with T, C only pair with G, so the possible pair in DNA are: AT, TA, CG, GC, so the DNA code is in base 4. DNA consists of two parts: - coding part (< 2%): Encodes proteins (the organism build blocks). This part is subdivided into genes. - non-coding part Doesn't encode proteins (but can have other functions, such as regulating, the part we don't know any function of is called "junk" DNA). The total length of human genome (diploid, all chromosome DNAs combined) is about 6.4 billion pairs, i.e. ~1.6 GB of information. The mapped human genome (haploid) has 3088286401 pairs (including mDNA) and 20412 genes.