The Jaina Doctrine of Karma And The Science Of Genetics: ▪ Products of Genes

Products of Genes

Gene exert their effects through the molecules they produce. The immediate products of a gene are molecules of ribonucleic acid (RNA), these are copies of DNA, except the RNA has the base uracil(C) instead of thiamine. The RNA molecules from some genes lay a direct part in the metabolism of the organism, but most of them are used to make protein. Proteins are chains of subunits known as amino acids, and the sequence of bases in the RNA determines the sequence of amino acids in the protein by means of the genetic code. The sequence of amino acids in a protein dictates whether it will become part of the structure of the organism or whether it will become an enzyme for promoting a particular chemical reaction. Thus change in DNA can produce changes that effect the structure or the chemistry of an organism.

The nucleotide bases in DNA that code the structure of RNAs and proteins are not the only components of genes, group of bases adjacent to the coding sequences affect the quantities and disposition of gene products. In higher organisms (animals and plants, rather than bacteria and viruses) the non coding sequence outnumber the coding ones by a factor of ten or more and the function of these non coding regions are largely unknown. This means that geneticists cannot yet prescribed limits to the size of animal and plant genes.
The genetic information is stored in packages, on genes where one gene holds the information for the production of polypeptide sequence. This idea was first hypothesized by Beadle the Tatum in 1941. Gene is a presumed unit of heredity. It is defined as a discrete sequences of DNA which code for given biological molecules such as a structural proteins and enzymes. Thus a gene might be defined as a polynucleotide tRNA, rRNA. As the information is in the form of a series of bases along the DNA molecule, a gene is simply a stretch of DNA, with a defined start site and a defined end. It can then be processed as a unit and the information passed on to the machinery, which will made the protein.

Not all the DNA in a cell are used for the storage of information therefore not all the DNA is used as a part of a gene. The stretches of DNA that lie between genes are known as intergenic DNA.^[110]