A tiny unit of information in your DNA that carries instructions for how your body is built and how it works, like eye color or blood type.
From German *Gen*, coined from Greek *genos* meaning “race, kind, offspring.” The word was created in the early 1900s to name the theoretical units of heredity scientists had inferred from experiments. Later, DNA research showed these units physically exist in chromosomes.
Every gene is like a sentence written in a four-letter code (A, T, C, G) that your cells can read. You carry about 20,000 genes, and many are shared not just with other humans, but with bananas, flies, and bacteria. Evolution is a giant editing project on these tiny text strings.
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