• Question: what happens when you don't look anything like your parents but they are definitely your parents?

    Asked by afnanyy___ to Rachel, Nicholas, Kate, Eva, David on 16 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Nicholas Pearce

      Nicholas Pearce answered on 16 Nov 2015:

      Hey,

      Everybody gets their DNA from their parents and DNA is the code that decides what you look like. This means you should have the same code to look like your parents, since they have the same DNA and the same code.
      Humans have two sets of DNA (one from your mum and one from your dad) but only one is used as the code to decide what you look like, the other DNA is just a spare!
      This means you can get the spare DNA from both your mum and your dad, so they are your parents and share your DNA, but that DNA actually makes you look different!

    • Photo: David Nunan

      David Nunan answered on 16 Nov 2015:

      Hi,

      so you get all your DNA from you biological parents, and their DNA has come from a mixture of their parents (your grandparents). For every characteristic you have DNA from both parents that relate to that characteristic. For example…dimples, you have 2 sets of information (DNA) about this characteristic, one from your mother one form you father. The gene (section of DNA) that holds this information might be the same from both parents or it could be 2 different versions of the same characteristic.

      By the time this lottery has been applied to all the characteristics that make up a human you can imagine why we might look very different from both parents or even a sister/brother. Equally there might be a feature that our grandparents have that our parents didn’t display but resurfaces in their children.

      I hope that makes some sense!?!

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