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.
Before you can understand how your mother's genes helped shape your future, you need a little Biology 101 lesson. Genes are your body's blueprint. They carry the instructions for producing (expressing) all of the many proteins in your body that determine how you look and how your body works. Your genes are housed in structures called chromosomes. Most cells holds 23 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 46. You probably learned back in high school that you inherited one set of these gene-carrying chromosomes from your mother and another set from your father, and that the genetic contributions of each parent worked out to be roughly equal.