not cheating

it stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. it's a really long molecule. it's all bundled up in the cell but it's about 6 feet long in humans if you were to unravel it. every cell of every animal, plant and bacteria has one of this molecule. it's in the shape of a double helix. when a cell divides this molecule is copied. when a zygote is created from two parents, some of the DNA information comes from one parent and some comes from the other. it contains all the information that defines how the organism is made up. it's more specifically i think it just encodes what proteins are made? it has means of error correction. it contains, umm, i think 46(??) chromosones in 23 pairs. one of the pairs is special and specific to the person's gender. an X and an X for females, an X and a Y for males. the chromosones are made of codons, which are small groups of base pairs of molecules. one base goes in one helix and is connected to the other base in the other helix. the bases are adenine, guanine, and i forget the other two. there's about 4 billion bytes of information in a single human DNA strand. i think before the DNA codes for proteins it's converted into RNA which actually does the encoding. most of the DNA information is called 'junk DNA' because it's suspected to made of up information that's not used, but we're not really sure whether it has a purpose or not. we have 99% of our DNA in common with our closest relative and 50% in common with bacteria. i'd know a lot more about DNA if my memory weren't so bad. there's probably more facts that I know about it if I thought longer.