FOR THE LOVE OF DNA "Chemistry is sex," Nia Jamieson, 1984 Between 10 to 100 trillion cells hold our

human body together. With such huge numbers, noone is quite sure of the exact number of trillions; the only certainty is that there are no less than 10 trillion. The marvel is that our body stays intact and lives for more than 30 seconds without flying apart, each cell for himself, or herself rather. Within all cells are the twirling strings of fate; living fate in the form of DNA molecules that spiral and twist in the dances of life and are never still. DNA keeps codes that tell each generation how to build bodies and behavior according to codes received from our ancestors. The fate that we are endowed with, our bodies and inclinations, depends on the genetic health of our forebearers, and even their lifestyles. DNA, a most elegant and beautiful molecule, has within it letters, language, and books based on an alphabet of four. These four alphabet bases are sufficient to create long strips of code. For each length of code, one signal marks its beginning and another its end. Each stretch of code is a gene. Genes carry the instructions for our hidden complicated chemistries and our not-so-hidden physical traits. DNA is built like a spiral ladder, with its alphabet bases protected in the middle, because they are the rungs of the ladder. The ladder's rails are made of crystalline sugar and phsophate, strange materials of fire and sweetness that hold our life together. DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, a word for those who like dragons. A dragon twisting and steadying the lore of heredity, named for sugar and the sharp tang of acid. The deoxy word comes from the constitution of the sugar that attaches to fiery phosphate (that is no joke, if you have ever heard of burning phosphate bombs). Each sugar has a pentagonal crystalline heart with four molecular arms, one at each corner. On one side, two arms reach for and grasp a phosphate; one arm is above and one is below sugar's pentagonal heart. On the opposite side of the heart, the upper arm holds a nucleic acid, one of four sisters in the alphabet of fate: the code bases of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. The code sisters bond with each other, via hydrogen fingers that provide two-pronged or threepronged electric paths between the sisters' rotund electron cloud bodies. Adenine bonds with thymine, and guanine keeps to cytosine. However, the code bases cannot sit across from each other, nor connect, without a series of linked sugar-phosphates at their back to hold them steady and away from water. For Susanne Dyby Page 1 9/11/2012

these code sisters (A T; G C) to remain bonded to each other, there must be two protective sugarphosphate chains protecting them from the outside environment, in addition to sentinel proteins (histones and other guardians). Thus, the hugely long DNA molecule has two long chains that twist around each other, each chain made of alternating sugar and phosphate, and making the two very long legs of a spiral ladder. The sister bases bridge across the inner spaces to build the rungs connecting the two sugarphosphate chains. A leggy ladder with a twist and a logic of its own, because each sugar-phosphate chain has a polarity, from top to bottom. Within a chain, the tip of sugar's pentagon heart all point up or all point down, never a mixture within a chain. The two chains have opposite polarity, one chain has a top to bottom polarity (each sugar's pentagon heart tip points up); the other runs bottom to top (sugar's pentagon tip points down), as in the opposing star sign of Pisces. This "69" position allows less stearic hindrance, as the chemists would say. No unseemly bulges and bumps, a minimalist, elegant, and lovely use of space to create the structure of heredity.

Then how do others get to open the book of life? Feminine; one might say, it opens and lets in the readers. There is courtship by chaperones, some of them shaped like flowers, that assist in the unfolding and opening of the DNA stretches to be read. A whirling dervish of a helicase, a spinning top, unwinds DNA in her very center and opens her to reveal the knowledge within. With her linked bases exposed, free bases jostle and compete to attach themselves, and create smaller chains next to her large one, in her open reading frames. DNA has many genes read at the same time, touched in many spots. Hence, the dance of life. The smaller chains are messages, instructions that float and are moved into the larger world of the cell, away from the sequestered damsel of fate that is locked into the nucleus, between divisions, away from many dangers of being ripped to shreds by DNases that roam and hunt and eat any unprotected DNA. An entire meter or more of instructions, billions of bases within the DNA, folds and re-folds into a space smaller than the point of a pin. This engineering feat is made possible, because DNA is cut into more manageable chunks; chunks of intensely folded DNA and associated molecules (such as the sentinels and bulwarks of DNA, the histones) that we can color with dyes and see with a microscope, hence "chromosomes." DNA is passed from generation to generation in these manageable chunks, our chromosomes so very tightly wound up by expert molecular wrappers who have perfected their miniturist art over untold years.

Susanne Dyby

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The highly precise choreography of division, the rite of passage that link the generations together, by the careful parsing out of her duplicated selves, are performed by dividing cells, across the five kingdoms of life, by those who are able to clone themselves or those who are sexual creatures and use meiosis to parse the numbers of chromosomes, so that each generation receives the same number as the last. Disaster strikes the person who is missing a chromosome or has too much of one, or too many. Even our oldest cousins, bacteria, must suffer if they are deprived of part of their DNA to make their modest walled cells, or if the process of DNA material between them is rudely interrupted. Yet they, too, allow foreign DNA into themselves to create something new.

Susanne Dyby

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