This week I’m in a whole new country, France. I’m not just visiting France for fun; I’m here to join some excellent researchers to dive into the tiny world of seabird cells. We are working together in a lab at the University of Strasbourg to try to understand a little bit more about the lives of our birds.
Let’s do some science! I bet you have heard of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid (can you say that five times fast?). DNA is the “instructions” for every living thing, responsible for our traits and appearance. Think of your DNA like a book. This book has billions of letters – base pairs – in it. But in order to make sense of these letters, the book of DNA has many different words, or genes. These genes are the instructions that tell our body what to do. Make your hair brown! Grow ten fingers! Become tall! So that our multibillion-letter DNA doesn’t get scrambled up, it is packaged into tidy structures called chromosomes. Most of us have 46 chromosomes in each cell. Birds, depending on the species, can have 80 or more!
Now, this brings us back to my research adventure in France. On the end of each of these chromosomes is a helpful cap made from both DNA and proteins.
