Genetics : The Science of Heredity

Genetics is the science of heredity and variation in living organisms. Knowledge of the inheritance of characteristics has been implicitly used since prehistoric times for improving crop plants and animals through selective breeding. However, the modern science of genetics, which seeks to understand the mechanisms of inheritance, only began with the work of Gregor Mendel in the mid-1800s.^[3] Although he did not know the physical basis for heredity, Mendel observed that inheritance is fundamentally a discrete process with specific traits that are inherited in an independent manner — these basic units of inheritance are now called genes.

Following the rediscovery of Mendel's observations in the early 1900s, research in 1910s yielded the first physical understanding of inheritance — that genes are arranged linearly along large cellular structures called chromosomes. By the 1950s it was understood that the core of a chromosome was a long molecule called DNA and genes existed as linear sections within the molecule. A single strand of DNA is a chain of four types of nucleotides; hereditary information is contained within the sequence of these nucleotides. Solved by Watson and Crick in 1953, DNA's three-dimensional structure is a double-stranded helix, with the nucleotides on each strand complementary to each other. Each strand acts as a template for synthesis of a new partner strand, providing the physical mechanism for the inheritance of information.

The sequence of nucleotides in DNA is used to produce specific sequences of amino acids, creating proteins — a correspondence known as the "genetic code". This sequence of amino acids in a protein determines how it folds into a three-dimensional structure, this structure is in turn responsible for the protein's function. Proteins are responsible for almost all functional roles in the cell. A change to DNA sequence can change a protein's structure and behavior, and this can have dramatic consequences in the cell and on the organism as a whole.