I see DNA everywhere

Before we moved to our new house ten blocks north, my family used to live in a two-bedroom apartment on 79th and Amsterdam. Although the move was a few years ago, I still find myself reminiscing about that home, where I spent the majority of my childhood. One particular memory is eating weekend dinners at the Indian restaurant Saravana Bhavan under our building. What my brother and I looked forward to most were the little seeds coated in sugar, called saunf, that were meant to be taken as an after-dinner mouth freshener, but what we poured into our tiny hands as dessert. It was after we moved and came back more irregularly to the restaurant that the seeds were no longer covered in colorful sugar and were instead just plain brown–and disgusting, given they were made more healthy. I was disappointed about this change, so it was very exciting to see the above container at a new restaurant we ate at last weekend. I don’t know how many years exactly it had been since I had seen or eaten them.

It may just be the way my brain has started to see genetics everywhere, but all those tiny, colorful, oval shaped seeds together reminded me of the four different nucleotide bases that make up DNA. The combinations of these bases are endless, and each specific combination—or gene—is the code for a specific protein, which in turn is code for a specific function. This is where all our traits come from. The four chemicals that make up the Nucleotides are Adenine, Thiamine, Guanine, and Cytosine, more commonly referred to as A, T, G, and C. To more clearly denote the distinctions between each of these chemicals when sequencing DNA, which entails digitally recording the “code” of nucleotides for a specific gene, each chemical or letter is color-coded.

You can see this in the picture above, which is a digital representation of a specific gene for four different fish of the same species. A is green, T is red, G is purple, and C is blue. Similarly, ignoring the bland, white ones, these yummy seeds had four colors. Orange, green, pink, and yellow. I had some fun at that restaurant thinking about depending on which combinations of seed colors I ate, it would end up tasting differently, just like how each combination of nucleotide colors would produce a different protein. Of course the combination of which seeds I ate had an infinitesimally smaller significance on my body and life on Earth as a whole, but I found some small happiness in connecting them. Although I consume so much information about science and genetics, whether it be through class or in the lab, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully wrap my head around the fact that these complex phenomena happen daily in our bodies. In a way, that’s why it felt nice for me to take a silly memory and use it to simplify something so hard to believe.