• Question: How does your DNA know what diseases you are most vulnerable to?

    Asked by Halifla Toms to David, Gemma, Juhi, Matt, Stéphane, Yinka on 12 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: David Howard

      David Howard answered on 12 Mar 2018:

      Your DNA doesn’t know which diseases you will be vulnerable too. It is only when the DNA is transcribed and turned into an incorrect (or entirely missing) protein that problems occur. Quite often these changes/mutations in DNA have no effect, but other times it will increase the chances of you getting a disease. Some mutations might lead to more than one disease, for example those with Huntington’s disease can also have a slightly higher risk of heart disease.

    • Photo: Stéphane Berneau

      Stéphane Berneau answered on 12 Mar 2018:

      Your DNA doesn’t “know”… Modifications such as mutation or deletion of genes can happen… and by natural selection, only significant traits will be kept. Meaning that some people will be more vulnerable to disease due to their genes.
      I want to precise that a healthy lifestyle is supposed to help prevent being sick (to a certain extent of course).

    • Photo: Gemma Chandratillake

      Gemma Chandratillake answered on 12 Mar 2018:

      Everyone has almost exactly the same DNA code – our DNA is 99.9% identical to each other. When we look at a person’s DNA code, we look at the regions in which we are different from one another. Scientists do not yet know what most of these differences in our DNA code mean, but there are some differences that we know are correlated with diseases. In some cases, it is very clear that if you have a particular difference, or glitch, in your code, you will have or go on to develop a particular disease (because everyone who has that glitch does). In other cases, it could be that you are very likely, but not certain to develop a particular disease, in some cases it could be that we know that that change increases your risk of developing a disease but only slightly, and in other cases the change may be “protective”, making it less likely that you would develop a disease. We get this information by studying the genetic differences of lots of people and also studying whether they have various diseases or not.

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