Human languages are pieced together from various sounds and letters. English has 26 letters in the alphabet. Chinese has no alphabet, four tones, and thousands of characters. Life, on the other hand, is much less complicated. From the Lactobacillus in your yogurt to your house plant to your best friend, we’re all made out of just four letters: A, C, T, and G.
A, C, T, and G stands for adenine, cytosine, thymine, and guanine. These four little letters spell out “words” whose definitions are amino acids. With 20 amino acids available and countless combinations and lengths, the human body produces up to several billion different proteins. Spelling differences in the A’s, C’s, T’s, and G’s of our genome cannot be quantified as good or bad because… well, it’s complicated.
These spelling differences I speak of are mutations. Sometimes, mutations don’t do anything. Other times, they do things like create antibiotic resistant bacteria strains. Good for the bacteria, not so good for us humans. Even not-so-alive things like viruses collect mutations as their DNA replicates!
As with any language, you don’t choose it, it has to choose you. So if you’re one of those people that has been inspired by the language of DNA, you can now adorn yourself with the macro-argentum/silver version of it! Trust us, it’s a lot better than the slimy kind* that you’ll find in a science lab.
*Unless you’re preparing a scanning electron microscope sample, then it’s crispy instead of slimy
