Genetics is the study of heredity and deals with genetic information and how it is passed on. In genetics, both the structure and the functions of genes are studied in more detail. As the study of heredity, it belongs to a branch of biology and examines individual characteristics that are passed down through several generations.
What is genetics?
Genetics is the study of heredity and deals with hereditary information and how it is passed on. In genetics, both the structure and the functions of genes are studied in more detail. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was already concerned with the morphology of plants, among other things. In the process, he coined the word “genetic,” which, however, was still associated with embryology and romantic natural philosophy in his day. The genetic method of the 19th century was the study of the ontogenesis of organisms, that is, their development as individuals or as single organisms. The antithesis to ontogenesis was phylogenetic development, called phylogenesis. In fact, the word “genetic” eventually became genetics as the designated research discipline of the British geneticist William Bateson. That was in 1905 and it was he who coined the word. Genetics was hereditary biology and human genetics related to humans, which sadly became established in Germany in 1940 when there was a call for racial hygiene. Genetics and its specialization are therefore relatively modern and young. It was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that the first more intensive ideas about the natural process of heredity appeared. The founder is the Augustinian monk and teacher Gregor Mendel, known for his crossbreeding experiments with flowers, plants and peas, which he evaluated and about which he drafted the Mendelian rules named after him. He recognized a fundamental regularity in the inheritance of plants to their offspring. Mendel’s rules established classical genetics, which in turn led to cytogenetics, including the discovery of the structure, number and shape of chromosomes that function as carriers of genetic information. Mendel’s rules apply only to organisms that are diploid and have haploid germ cells, i.e. have received one set of chromosomes from each parent. This applies to most plants and animals. Mendel took pea seeds and flowers, whose characteristics, color and shape he examined more closely. His findings, however, although recorded by him forty years earlier, were not recognized until 1900. Other biologists and botanists came to similar results and also discovered chromosomes. Both theories and rules were combined and are today common property of genetics. Of course, other genetic phenomena have been researched that deviate from Mendel’s laws, e.g. gene linkage. As a result, Mendel’s rules have now become obsolete.
Treatments and therapies
The genetic material, also called the genome, plays an essential role in genetics. This can affect both living organisms and viruses. The genome is the totality of material carriers of all inherited information of a cell or virus. Here, the DNA, the chromosomes and the RNA in viruses are studied. Genetics is therefore concerned with the structure of genomes and the interactions between genes. It is an essential subfield of genetics. In humans, the genome comprises 46 chromosomes and 3 billion base pairs. The latter consist of about 80 percent undefined DNA and 20 percent gene-coding DNA. About 10 percent of this regulates metabolism, while 90 percent is used for cell-specific gene expression. This, in turn, is understood to mean the biosynthesis of proteins, on the basis of which the genetic information and its required processes can be identified. Molecular genetics is also an essential part of genetics, which was founded in 1940. It deals with the biosynthesis, structure and functions of DNA and RNA, the latter at the molecular level. It also observes how these interact with proteins and behave with each other. The subfield of genetics encompasses many fields, including biochemistry or biology in addition to genetics. Here, the molecular basis of further inheritance plays an essential role, the duplication of DNA in a cell or of macromolecules and their changes in information content, which can then occur, for example, as mutations.Replication, for example, always results in exact duplications of DNA, and it also occurs only in a very specific phase of the cell cycle. Cellular and genetic duplication leads to multiplication of bacteria and primordial bacteria. In turn, the RNA of viruses uses the enzymes and precursors of the host cell. Also a field of genetics is epigenetics, which deals with the transmission of the characteristics of all offspring that do not have deviations of the DNA sequence, but changes in gene regulation.
Diagnosis and methods of investigation
Whether nicotine or alcohol addiction, for example, is heritable is also part of genetics. Since the hereditary factors and their genetic material have considerable effects on the offspring, and the genetic material including structure, function and characteristics is coded, diseases also occur again and again, the cause of which is to be sought in a change in the DNA. Here we speak of hereditary diseases, which usually do not occur in childhood, but already in adulthood. The DNA is mainly located in the cell nucleus. As soon as the genetic material has errors, the genetic processes in the cells are disturbed. Cystic fibrosis or Down syndrome, for example, are two of the diseases that can occur due to altered genetic material. These changes are passed on to the next generation either through the father’s sperm or the mother’s egg, and they do not always have to occur in the following generation, but can also skip generations.