Pet Code
A playful take on the notion of 'how much you resemble your pet' from a genetic perspective.
by
UNPLUCKED &
Iona Inglesby
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We all feel a great affinity with our pets. In many cases, they are a true extension of ourselves. But have you ever wondered how much we really have in common? How much of our actual genetic blueprint we share with them? PetCODE, a collection brought to you by Unplucked and DotOne, explores this question in a playful, scientifically rigorous manner. We have started with 4 initial ‘companions’, but who knows where we will end!
Introduction to Genetics
DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms.
The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences.
We share around 99.9% of our DNA code with everyone else on earth as we all descended from the same group of ‘modern humans’ around 200,000 years ago.
But it is not just humans that have genetic similarity; we share much of our DNA code with other organisms too. This is due to a Universal Common Ancestor from which all organisms now living on Earth have a mutual descent. The Last Universal Common Ancestor [LUCA] is estimated to have lived some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.
For this reason we share around 96% of genetic code with our closest living relative.. the chimpanzee, and 18% with baker’s yeast!
How it Works
The DNA molecule is found in the nucleus of each cell and is packaged into thread-like structures called chromosomes, the number of which varies from species to species. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs - one set inherited from the mother, and one from the father.
It is possible to visualise which parts of our genetic code humans share with other species by colour coding the 23 human chromosomes, and mapping this colour onto chromosomes of other species where similarities in their DNA sequence occur.
In the fictional example opposite, human chromosome 2, coloured dark grey, contains a section of DNA with sequence ATAGGCATACATA. This same sequence is found on Species ‘x’ chromosome 1. The location of this sequence is coloured dark grey to visualise the region of comparison.
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*Not all of the data is represented in the maps - if the species shares 55% of their genetic code with humans, then the 45% of unmatched data has been omitted from their chromosome map.
