Question: What does Dna allow you to do aswell as say who you are

Claire Bryer answered on 19 Jun 2015:

Because DNA can tell you who you are, this makes it useful in all sorts of ways. It can tell you if you’re likely to develop any diseases in your lifetime. It can tell you what drugs you may not be able to metabolise very well, or where you come from, or even if you’re likely to go bald! For a little over £100 you can now get a test that can tell you these things.

DNA can also be used in forensics-if the police can match up DNA samples found at the crime scene to those of the suspect, then this can sometimes be used as evidence in court.

In the future DNA might be used to ‘repair’ faulty genes, using gene therapy, as the field is now rapidly advancing.

Another rapidly advancing scientific field is that of synthetic biology. This takes DNA as a basic building block for life and they try to make something from scratch. This could be creating a new cell (synthetic life) or making unnatural nucleotides and amino acids which basically means they are expanding the DNA code to make it more complex. One idea in synthetic biology is to use DNA to store information in the code (books and digital information can be lost or changed over time). There is a project that encoded the complete sonnets of William Shakespeare in DNA!