Concept To prevent that DNA damage and errors remain in the cell, having serious consequences or being passed on to offspring, the cell has several mechanisms that correct errors and maintain genome integrity, called DNA repair mechanisms. Both eukaryotes and prokaryotes have these mechanisms. The importance of DNA repair DNA is the basis of the […]

Hereditary diseases Hereditary diseases are diseases that follow inheritance patterns within families. Since there is inherent difficulty in studies of heredity in humans (due to the impossibility of controlling crosses, long generation time and small number of offspring), the study of hereditary diseases is done through the construction and analysis of an ‘heredogram’. Alternatively, studies […]

Mitochondrial DNA definition Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) refers to the DNA that is located inside the mitochondria, an organelle present in eukaryotic cells. MtDNA is double stranded but, unlike nuclear DNA, is circular, not packaged in chromatin, the translation of its codons into proteins does not follow the rules of the universal genetic code and has […]