What happens when your DNA is damaged? - Monica Menesini
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/what-happens-when-your-dna-is-damaged-monica-menesini The DNA in just one of your cells gets damaged tens of thousands of times per day. Because...
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The DNA in just one of your cells gets damaged tens of thousands of times per day. Multiply that by your body's hundred trillion or so cells, and you've got a quintillion DNA errors everyday. And because DNA provides the blueprint for the proteins your cells need to function, damage causes serious problems, such as cancer. The errors come in different forms. Sometimes nucleotides, DNA's building blocks, get damaged, other times nucleotides get matched up incorrectly, causing mutations, and nicks in one or both strands can interfere with DNA replication, or even cause sections of DNA to get mixed up. Fortunately, your cells have ways of fixing most of these problems most of the time. These repair pathways all rely on specialized enzyme...
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The DNA in just one of your cells gets damaged tens of thousands of times per day. Multiply that by your body's hundred trillion or so cells, and you've got a quintillion DNA errors everyday. And because DNA provides the blueprint for the proteins your cells need to function, damage causes serious problems, such as cancer. The errors come in different forms. Sometimes nucleotides, DNA's building blocks, get damaged, other times nucleotides get matched up incorrectly, causing mutations, and nicks in one or both strands can interfere with DNA replication, or even cause sections of DNA to get mixed up. Fortunately, your cells have ways of fixing most of these problems most of the time. These repair pathways all rely on specialized enzyme...
