melanie's blog

fun genomics

1. For centuries, presumably all the way back to Aristotle, folklore has it that hereditary passed through our blood. Think of terms like 'bad blood', 'mixed blood', 'royal blood', 'blue blood', 'bloodline' and you get the idea. The irony is that there is no hereditary coded in your red blood whatsoever. The red blood cells are the only kind of cells in your body that don't have DNA - because they're the only cells in your body that don't have nuclei. Go figure.

2. If you line up all the threads of DNA from every cell in your body end to end, the entire length would be long enough to reach to the sun and back 500 times. Now consider how compact your DNA is.

3. The man now known as the father of modern genetics was a nature lover who spent hours tending the monastery garden. Gregor Mendel, the nineteeth-century monk who studied more that 10,000 plants -meticulously following traits such as seed color, plant height, and pea color, came up with a set of theories that turned out to be dead-on and are now known as the Mendelian laws of inheritance.

4. You have 23 pairs of chromosomes that make you uniquely you. But among the 3.2 billion base pairs on those chromosoems, you have only about 31,000 genes. That is not even double the amount of genes a roundworm has. There is a variety of amoeba that has nearly 200 times the amount of genes that we do.

5. The difference between you and that unrelated guys walking his poodle down the street is just 0.1%. That means you share with any given unrelated person 99.9% of the same DNA. And in fact, the order of all those bases is exactly the same in almost all people - only 3 million bases is different from person to person.

6. According to Human Genome Project statistics, if you and a friend started reciting your DNA sequences at the rate of one letter a second, it would be more than eight and half minutes before the two of you reached a difference.

7. There is no such thing as race. And speaking of common ancestors, there turns out to be no such thing as race at the DNA level. You cannot tell simply by looking at someone's DNA whether they are black or white.

8. 95% of our DNA doesn't include genes at all and they call them junk DNA. The human genome has a much bigger percentage of junkk DNA than most ofther organisms do. The roundworm has 7% and fruit fly, only 3%.

9. Males carry most of the mutations. The mutation rate is roughly twice the female rate. Sperm cell requires 400 cell divisions but female eggs only require two dozen cell divisions (and were completed and seet aside before the female is even born). The more cell division a cell goes through, the more chances of error. So it makes sense.

10. The most populous chromosome is chromosome 1. It has more genes than any other chromosome: a total of 2,968. The most arid chromosome is the male Y chromosome, which only carries 231 genes.

grandpa's 98th

My grandpa turned 98th last month... we had a celebration at home. More than a hundred came to celebrate and we had a blast!!!

I love my ah gong...

cool.. friendster can host pictures.. hahaha..its a bit small but better than nothing right?

integration in progress

its amazing how things around you change as you live day by day. It just dawned on me on Sunday that now, i am actually interacting more and hanging out more with my supposedly 'new friends' other than the usual Melbourne ACCF group. That discovery really caught me unaware and surprised me. In a good way perhaps.

I strongly think that it is a good sign. At least to me, it shows that i am developing new relationship and making new friends. To me, there are usually 3 types of relationships and 'gathering' so to speak. One where you receive, one where you give of yourself and one where you just be yourself, relax and hang (giving and receiving become subconscious as it comes naturally when one feels at home). I say when you are able to just hang and relax, you call them friends. This group of people are not easy to find, at least for me... but i think i am beginning to find them as i go about living my life here in this not-so-new land. I have people whom i can just hang out without any agenda, laugh and talk about absolutely anything including stupid jokes or even make fun of ourselves. I am glad... He has made my heart glad in the realization of this progress - i call it integration. :)

I guess I am subconsciously getting integrated into the community around me and building new meaningful and truthful relationships. My God is good!! I look forward to more of it with great anticipation and hope!!