8. Now figure out how many sheets of graph paper you would have to use to list all the bases in a gene of 90,000 bases (not far from the average size of a human gene).

Now it is clear that genes are what carry our traits through generations and that genes are made of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). But genes themselves don't do the actual work. Rather, they serve as instruction books for making functional molecules such as ribonucleic acid (RNA) and proteins, which perform the chemical reactions in our bodies. Proteins do many other things, too. They provide the body's main building materials, forming the cell's architecture and structural components. But one thing proteins can't do is make copies of themselves. When a cell needs more proteins, it uses the manufacturing instructions coded in DNA. The DNA code of a gene-the sequence of its individual DNA building blocks, labeled A (adenine), T (thymine), C (cytosine) and G (guanine) and collectively called nucleotides - spells out the exact order of a protein's building blocks, amino acids.

Occasionally, there is a kind of typographical error in a gene's DNA sequence. This mistake - which can be a change, gap or duplication-is called a mutation.