13 lines
697 B
Markdown
13 lines
697 B
Markdown
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# Introduction
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Your body is made up of cells that contain DNA.
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Those cells regularly wear out and need replacing, which they achieve by dividing into daughter cells.
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In fact, the average human body experiences about 10 quadrillion cell divisions in a lifetime!
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When cells divide, their DNA replicates too.
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Sometimes during this process mistakes happen and single pieces of DNA get encoded with the incorrect information.
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If we compare two strands of DNA and count the differences between them, we can see how many mistakes occurred.
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This is known as the "Hamming distance".
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The Hamming distance is useful in many areas of science, not just biology, so it's a nice phrase to be familiar with :)
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