This is an iHeart podcast. Do you know what's at the root of most oral health problems like cavities and gingivitis?
Ding ding ding. You're right.
It's bacteria, and the Colgate total active prevention system is 15 times more effective at fighting that bacteria.
When used together, the system reduces bacteria buildup in six weeks, starting in week one compared to a non -stannous fluoride toothpaste and flat trimmed toothbrush.
Take that, mouth bacteria.
Be dentist ready. Shop the Colgate Total Active Prevention System by visiting shop .colgate .com slash total.
["In the Hall of the Mountain King"] Hey, welcome to The Short Stuff, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is Short Stuff, the Mysteries of Genetic Nutations Edition.
And that's right because we're gonna talk about the X -Men.
Yeah, a mutation. I mean, I don't know if it would help you join the X -Men but there are mutations that alter people sometimes in positive ways.
We usually associate it with negative stuff like a congenital disease or something.
A lot of them are neutral.
I think actually the vast majority are neutral.
They don't really have any noticeable effect.
Some are beneficial.
lactose intolerance, immunity to malaria when someone's vestigial tail turns into a glorious full tail.
Those are all beneficial genetic mutations but all of them share something in common and that is that the the replication of the person's genome had some sort of error while it was being copied.
Is lactose intolerance beneficial?
No lactose tolerance.
Now, I think you...
I thought you said intolerance.
Oh, I'm sorry. Yes.
So, lactose intolerance is apparently the baseline, the default lactose tolerance is from a genetic mutation.
All right. Well, let's get into this.
Let's talk about DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid, as we all like to call it.
Such a great word. Around the campfire.
That's a molecule that's gonna carry genetic material, I almost said mutation, when you're you're developing as a future human.
And structurally, I think we've all seen the, if you've seen Jurassic Park, you've seen what this double helix looks like.
It's a long molecule comprised of nucleotides.
And there's two strands to that coil that form the double helix that kind of wind around each other.
and that's what the DNA, the full DNA, what would you call it, just molecule looks like?
The genome? Yeah, the molecule.
DNA is a molecule. Yeah.
And you said it, man.
It is long. Apparently if you stretched it out, it would be about two meters or six feet tall if you could figure out how to stretch it out.
It's amazing. And it's made of 3 .1 billion base pairs of nucleotides, thiamine, cytosine, guanine, and adenine.
And adenine goes with thiamine and cytosine goes with guanine.
And you put all that together, just with those combinations, you have a galaxy of different code that's embedded into the DNA that serves us, like it tells the rest of your body, each cell, what it's and how to do it.
And usually that has to do with expressing proteins.
Yeah, you know, like you mentioned, as the cells divide and the DNA is making copies of itself, there might be errors here and there, and that's where those mutations come from.
And in the egg and sperm cells, those are going to be passed onto the next generation.
So, that's a genetic mutation that's going to carry on and cause disease or genetic disorders.
You can also have what's called a somatic mutation and that only affects you.
It's not inherited by your future kids.
Exactly. So, really the big problem is genes, like a gene not being replicated correctly.
And a gene is just a stretch of nucleotide base pairs along your genome that together shows how to encode a protein.
It's the instructions to how to do a specific thing.
And again, it's just a segment along your DNA.
And when that stuff gets copied, if there's any kind of error, like say you match up an adenine to a cytosine, it's going to prevent that cellular process that whatever the gene is telling the cell to do to not be able to be performed correctly, hence a mutation.
Yeah, and our cells are constantly copying themselves, that are either replacing old cells or damaged cells and when that happens, when they're doing that copy, that double stranded DNA is going to split into the two parts and each strand is copied on its own and then they come back together and when that happens there can be errors.
The good news is it's approximately one in every 100 million replications this happens so that's a pretty good statistic to have in your hip pocket.
The other good news is DNA knows what it's doing.
So it generally knows when an error happens and they try to and often can repair and correct that before any problems arise.
Yes, I think that's a pretty good place to take a break, Chuck.
So let's take a break.
Chuck, let's do it.
CH bubba bubba bubba bubba.
Hey everybody, we want to talk to you about Squarespace and in particular, if you have a great idea that you want to sell on the web, well Squarespace makes it easy to sell access to content on your websites.
That's right you can do online courses, you can do blogs, videos, memberships, you can even earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall.
Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one -time fee or a subscription for access.
That's right, and you can get your content discovered fast with integrated SEO tools.
Every Squarespace website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, an auto -generated site map, and more, so you show up more often to more people in global search engine results.
Just go to squarespace .com slash stuff and you can get a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use our offer code STUFF, S -T -U -F -F, to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
Are you looking for a better job but searching for one feels like having another job?
Well, since our podcast is all about stuff you should know, we wanted to fill you in on a not so little job searching hack.
Indeed. Indeed makes it super easy to find better work.
And the best part? You All you have to do is update your Indeed profile with your skills, experience, and salary expectations.
Once you do, you'll automatically be matched with jobs that fit what you're looking for.
Yeah, and we're quite lucky.
For our job, we get to go search for things like, how champagne gets its bubbles, or what the heck is volcanic lightning, or the invention of the rubber duck.
That kind of searching, that's fun.
But spending hours trying to find a job you might like, especially when you already have a full -time gig, and just know there's something better out there, that is not so fun.
As people who love to deep -dive, it's understandable to not want to waste time on stuff that doesn't truly spark your curiosity.
And with Indeed, you don't have to.
You skip straight to the part where relevant roles find you.
Not the other way around.
Plus, when you update your Indeed profile, you're twice as likely to hear back from employers.
Ready to give it a try?
Update your Indeed profile and see how the world can work better, today!
Okay, so there's basically two ways that you can, that a genetic mutation can develop.
The cell replication which we've talked a lot about and then environmental influences.
And there are actually different ways that can happen, even during cell replication.
There are tautomeric shifts, which is where the nucleotide itself undergoes a quick chemical reaction to where suddenly adenine turns into, I don't know, silver, just for a second and then it eventually turns back.
But if that adenine nucleotide is being copied at that moment, you're going to have a silver nucleotide in your DNA and silver just don't work when it comes to making proteins.
So that's sort of due to bad timing.
Another thing that can happen as far as those errors go is called mispairing.
And was this the HowStuffWorks article?
Yes it was. Yeah. They did a pretty good job of putting this in terms we can understand if you imagine those two DNA strands that work together or zip together like a zipper.
Sometimes that zipper doesn't align.
Your penis gets stuck in it.
Oh my God. And that can happen when the DNA is getting zipped back up.
And that can cause parts of it to be skipped over or maybe something added that shouldn't be?
Right. And then the third way that a mutation can happen during replication is what's called jumping genes, cousins of jumping jacks.
And that is where… so these genes are normally, I don't understand this fully, but genes which again are just stretches of code on your DNA can actually move.
They can change positions, they can change places.
Sometimes they replicate themselves and the replicant goes and embeds itself in another segment of your DNA.
And if it does so in a gene, another gene, then it's going to mess up that gene's ability to perform its function.
Did not know that that was a thing.
Did not, either. Had never heard of jumping genes.
I've heard of jumping beans, and jumping jacks, but never jumping genes.
Very nice. So that's the ways that can happen as far as like an error occurring in your body on a cellular level.
You mentioned external factors.
One of the big ones, and I didn't know to this extent even, is radiation.
And you might be thinking like, yeah, so you just don't get x -rayed when you're pregnant?
Like, that solves everything, right?
And that's not necessarily the case because UV irradiation can be a very big cause of mutations, specifically when it's called like a sunburn on your DNA, if you have too much UV radiation, they can form something called – how would you say that?
I'm going to say pyrimidine dimers.
Pyrimidine dimers? And I looked, I was like, is that a misprint?
Is it supposed to be dimmers?
And nope. No, it's dimers.
And especially thymine dimers that can distort that DNA structure.
And that's sort of like a sunburn on the DNA.
And that happens when a couple of DNA building blocks are stuck together, and that's oftentimes caused from sun exposure.
There's also chemical factors, too, which are basically biological or environmental factors.
essentially what it is, is there's different kinds of chemicals that can make their way into the DNA in the nucleus of a cell and just mess with it.
Sometimes they mimic nucleotides and they get pulled in like like just some guy walking down the street getting pulled into the Jimmy Fallon late night show because they couldn't get enough people to fill seats.
That can happen during DNA reproduction replication and when that that nucleotide that didn't mean to be there, gets entered into the new code of DNA, again, problems arise, that's a mutation.
The problems arise when they have to sit there and watch Jimmy Fallon.
Oh, boy. I'm gonna hear it.
There are also biological factors like a virus can cause that can get in the DNA, and that can lead to mutations.
And then there's some other environmental stuff as well, right?
Yeah. Deanimating agents, they actually remove parts of our DNA substances like stuff found in cigarette smoke.
Can stick to DNA like so much tar and change the shape of the DNA.
Essentially, you don't want anything going anywhere near your DNA.
And if there's something that happens and it happens on an important gene, that mutation is going to produce some sort of problems down the line.
But our body is actually really, really good at either preventing these errors or correcting them when it finds them, which is just mind boggling to me.
Yeah, it's super cool that our body can do this.
Sometimes it's called a direct fix and these are just small little errors, like they likened it to a road crack and they also likened it to just a quick patch on that road.
The cell just directly fixes it super quick like.
And we should say the cell that's transcribing the DNA is aware of it because there are different molecules that proof read the newly created DNA to make sure it matches the original.
Yeah, it is. So if they find a mismatch, if they find just some stretch, it could be big, small, whatever, they'll actually cut it out, excision, they'll digest it, and then they'll reproduce the correct version of it and then connect it to that part that they cut out of the DNA and then zip it together.
And if it's, if a whole section of DNA gets damaged, they can go to another DNA strand and say, hey, I'm glad you're here, because we're gonna use you now to come fix this other strand.
Yeah. Thank God you're here.
They were about to pull us into Jimmy Fallon and we needed something to do.
That's a offset thing in my house, Thank God, I was here because I know we mentioned War of the Roses, the movie, how it holds up.
It's one of the great lines from War of the Roses when they are separated but Michael Douglas is still in the house and the Christmas tree catches fire and he runs downstairs and puts it out and screams, thank God I was here.
And I say that a lot and it's just whenever anything dumb happens that I saw for the family, I go, thank God I was here.
That's great. That's a great thing.
Man, Chuck, everybody loves Chuck for reasons like that.
Not everybody. Just like Raymond.
All those people can go soak their heads.
Oh OK. Thank you. Well, since I think we're out of stuff to talk about, short stuff is out.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
