What are Genes?

Genes are the recipes for making proteins. Genes have the information and proteins do the work. Genes help to determine all the structures of your body. The proteins made from genes help make the shape of your face (for example identical twins have exactly the same genes and look alike), hair color, and organs like your heart and brain. Humans have about 80,000 genes. One of the goals of the Genome Project is to find the sequence of all the genes. Genes range in size from 100 chemical bases to more then 1,000,000. Genes are formed like sentences from the chemical bases, certain groups of which act like a capital letter to start the sentence or gene.

Back to Genome project home page