Do you know of any good tutorials of DNA structure covering the elements you describe?
I’m a member of a forum for jaguar owners. Somebody wrote a book, XJ6, Bumper to Bumper, where he walks you through the entire car, every major part, from front to back.
That kind of thing for DNA would be extremely helpful. Something that shows all the different kinds of functional blocks within DNA, and how they’re all pieced together. When they say a gene, is it a pattern of dna starting at base pair X? Starting at functional block X? How does copy number variation work? Are all the copies in the same place?
Your post had a bunch more types of functional units. I’d love to have a nice PBS video with pretty colors and a soothing narrator giving me the tour, and pointing out those functional units and others as we stroll down a DNA strand.
I’m not ignorant on purpose. I’ve tried to look for this kind of information, but I’ve never been satisfied with the material I’ve found. I haven’t found anything really tied to DNA structure, only a “this, that, and the other” verbal listing.
Molecular Biology of the Cell (Alberts) is a textbook of cell biology that gets a lot of recommendations; when you go to a talk where someone is investigating something and figures out a wrinkle or complication to some process they will often call the general consensus “the Alberts version”. Has all kinds of information on general cell biology, with the information on DNA coding and function spread in a couple of chapters.
On the rather more technical end, I loved the book “The Origins of Genome Architecture” by Dr. Michael Lynch. It’s kind of half a massive review article of features you find in eukaryotic genome structure and how they vary across the tree of life, with a major focus on evolutionary biology and mechanisms of how they change over time, and with bibliography that must be a fifth of the book. It’s other half of its content is basically the author pushing his idea that for eukaryotes and multicellular organisms in particular, most of their genome architecture got the way it is via non-adaptive processes that have more to do with the sorts of mutation that are possible than their end fitness results. Makes a compelling argument and shows all kinds of details of DNA function I did not know about until I read it, but gets very technical very fast and is written in many parts like a scientific paper with biologists in mind.
An intro biology textbook will not cover DNA in the detail CellBioGuy touched on. You’d need to read an intro Bio book and then maybe intro Molecular Biology, and then find a book focusing on DNA.
Do you know of any good tutorials of DNA structure covering the elements you describe?
I’m a member of a forum for jaguar owners. Somebody wrote a book, XJ6, Bumper to Bumper, where he walks you through the entire car, every major part, from front to back.
That kind of thing for DNA would be extremely helpful. Something that shows all the different kinds of functional blocks within DNA, and how they’re all pieced together. When they say a gene, is it a pattern of dna starting at base pair X? Starting at functional block X? How does copy number variation work? Are all the copies in the same place?
Your post had a bunch more types of functional units. I’d love to have a nice PBS video with pretty colors and a soothing narrator giving me the tour, and pointing out those functional units and others as we stroll down a DNA strand.
I’m not ignorant on purpose. I’ve tried to look for this kind of information, but I’ve never been satisfied with the material I’ve found. I haven’t found anything really tied to DNA structure, only a “this, that, and the other” verbal listing.
A biology textbook? Perhaps that big brown one that says “Biology” on the front.
Textbooks are great!
Molecular Biology of the Cell (Alberts) is a textbook of cell biology that gets a lot of recommendations; when you go to a talk where someone is investigating something and figures out a wrinkle or complication to some process they will often call the general consensus “the Alberts version”. Has all kinds of information on general cell biology, with the information on DNA coding and function spread in a couple of chapters.
On the rather more technical end, I loved the book “The Origins of Genome Architecture” by Dr. Michael Lynch. It’s kind of half a massive review article of features you find in eukaryotic genome structure and how they vary across the tree of life, with a major focus on evolutionary biology and mechanisms of how they change over time, and with bibliography that must be a fifth of the book. It’s other half of its content is basically the author pushing his idea that for eukaryotes and multicellular organisms in particular, most of their genome architecture got the way it is via non-adaptive processes that have more to do with the sorts of mutation that are possible than their end fitness results. Makes a compelling argument and shows all kinds of details of DNA function I did not know about until I read it, but gets very technical very fast and is written in many parts like a scientific paper with biologists in mind.
An intro biology textbook will not cover DNA in the detail CellBioGuy touched on. You’d need to read an intro Bio book and then maybe intro Molecular Biology, and then find a book focusing on DNA.
Even better.