Weil is less enthusiastic about white, or button, mushrooms, a species of mushroom that also includes Portobellos and criminis. âButton mushrooms do possess some health benefits, but not the general health benefits found in Asian mushrooms,â Weil says.
What sort of information do they encode, and how can this affect a cell's characteristics and activities? Some genes enable cells to make proteins needed for basic functions; dubbed housekeeping genes, they are active in many types of cells. Other genes, however, are inactive most of the time. Some genes play a role in early development of the embryo and are then shut down forever. Many genes encode proteins that are unique to a particular kind of cell and that give the cell its character - making a brain cell, say, different from a bone cell. A normal cell activates just the genes it needs at the moment and actively suppresses the rest.
A gene is a stretch of DNA on a chromosome that has the instructions for making a protein. Each chromosome has many genes with humans having over 22,000 genes in all. A gene's instructions for a protein are written in the three letter code I referred to before.A protein is a molecular machine that does a specific job.NA is the chemical that chromosomes and genes are made of. DNA itself is made up of four simple chemical units that are abbreviated as A, G, C, and T. These letters are used to form three letter words that cells can read.