Behavioral Ecology Blog

So I was working on some sequences the other night using ClustalW, the online resource for editing and aligning sequences, when Patrick, my 10 year old come up and asked me what I was doing. He noticed all the interesting colors (as bases are colored in this program), and picked up on some of the obvious patterns.

“What’s that” he asks…

Having my science brain on at the moment, I told him that these represented MHC sequences from several different rodent species, and that I was going to develop primers targeting a specific exon….

“Huh”…. His predictable response came soon after.

So I started to explain that “genes made your body do things, and this gene helps you fight diseases”, but apparently, he has not learned about genes in school yet, as indicated by the blank look on his face… I took a step back.

DNA is a collection of genes, and genes make your body do all the things it does…. DNA is in your cells, all of them (remember the target audience)…

Now we are starting to get some place- shocking though that he has never been introduced to this basic life science material.. He is in 5th grade now. In what grade do they introduce this stuff??

So not to relate the concept of DNA and genes back to what started it all- DNA sequence data. This was hard. I showed him a model of DNA, and pointed out the base pairing.. I explained that there were only 4 types of bases, and that certain bases only paired with certain others.. What the sequence I was working with was a list of these bases..

“So why do some animals have different lists” he asks.. We were using the enzyme amylase as an example. You know, 10 year olds like spit, and to know something about it makes you cool. Additionally, its function is pretty easy to understand, and all (most??) animals have it.. “especially what the gene from different animals makes the same thing”, he adds.

Thankfully, it was bedtime, and I was able to dodge the issue of homology, convergence, mutation, drift, and stochastic processes at least for now..

Anyway- for the teachers amongst us… at what grade is DNA/genetics introduced?