50 Fun Facts About DNA Trivia for Kids

DNA is shaped like a twisted ladder. What is that shape called?

Two long chains coil around each other, and the 'rungs' of the ladder are pairs of chemical letters.

How many different 'letters', or bases, make up the DNA code?

They are adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine, usually written A, T, C and G.

In DNA, the letter A always pairs with which letter?

C pairs with G, and the pairs are held together by hydrogen bonds like the rungs of a ladder.

What do the letters DNA stand for?

It is a long word for a long molecule; the 'deoxyribose' part is the sugar in its backbone.

Besides four bases, each unit of DNA contains a phosphate group and what kind of sugar?

The sugars and phosphates form the two rails of the ladder, and the bases stick out to pair in the middle.

Inside animal and plant cells, where is most DNA stored?

A little DNA also lives in the mitochondria, the cell's power plants, and in plants' chloroplasts.

How many chromosomes are in a normal human cell?

They come in 23 pairs: 22 pairs of ordinary chromosomes plus one pair of sex chromosomes.

Which pair of sex chromosomes do boys usually have?

Girls usually have two X chromosomes; the Y is one of the smallest chromosomes.

Down syndrome happens when a person has an extra copy of which numbered chromosome?

That is why it is also called trisomy 21, meaning three copies of 21.

Which cell part reads instructions copied from DNA and builds proteins?

It reads a message called mRNA three letters at a time and links up amino acids in the right order.

Which special proteins act like spools that DNA winds around to fit inside a cell?

Without them, the unwound DNA in your chromosomes would be far too long to fit.

Which Swiss scientist first isolated DNA in 1869, using cells from pus-soaked bandages?

He called the stuff 'nuclein' because it came from the nucleus of white blood cells.

Which two scientists announced the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953?

They shared the 1962 Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins for the discovery.

Rosalind Franklin's lab produced a famous X-ray picture of DNA in 1952. What was it called?

Her student Raymond Gosling took it, and it was the 51st picture he had made.

Rosalind Franklin was an expert in which scientific skill?

She used X-rays to work out the shapes of molecules and later studied viruses too.

Which chemist wrongly suggested in early 1953 that DNA was a triple helix?

His model had basic mistakes, and Watson and Crick's double helix came out a few months later.

Gregor Mendel worked out the basic rules of heredity by growing which plants?

The Augustinian friar studied seven traits, such as plant height and seed shape, between 1856 and 1863.

Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, had what job?

He was an Augustinian friar and later abbot of his monastery in Brno, in today's Czech Republic.

Identical twins look alike because they grow from what?

Fraternal twins come from two separate eggs, so they are no more alike than ordinary brothers and sisters.

Which type of DNA do you inherit only from your mother?

Mitochondria are the cell's power plants, and their small circle of DNA has 16,569 letters.

Roughly how many base pairs (letters) are in the human genome?

The Human Genome Project set out to read them all, starting in 1990.

The Human Genome Project, which read the human DNA code, was declared complete in which year?

It began in 1990 and cost about $3 billion, ending two years ahead of schedule.

National DNA Day is celebrated in the US on which date?

It marks the day in 1953 when the DNA structure papers appeared in the journal Nature.

Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, was what kind of animal?

She was born in 1996 at the Roslin Institute in Scotland and had several lambs of her own.

Dolly the sheep was cloned from a cell taken from which part of another sheep?

That is why she was named after singer Dolly Parton, and it proved a body cell could make a whole new animal.

In Jurassic Park, scientists get dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes trapped in what?

They fill the gaps with frog DNA, which is why the dinosaurs can change sex and breed.

The title of the 1997 movie Gattaca is spelled using only what?

G, A, T and C stand for guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine.

Sir Alec Jeffreys invented DNA fingerprinting in 1984 at a university in which English city?

Police now use it worldwide, and it also settles paternity and immigration cases.

Which laboratory trick, invented by Kary Mullis, makes millions of copies of a tiny bit of DNA?

Polymerase chain reaction works by heating and cooling the DNA over and over; Mullis won a Nobel Prize for it in 1993.

CRISPR gene editing works like what kind of tool for cutting DNA?

It was borrowed from a defence system bacteria use against viruses, and won a Nobel Prize in 2020.

Which two scientists won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for CRISPR gene editing?

Their teams first showed how to use CRISPR-Cas9 to edit DNA in 2012.

GloFish, the glowing pet fish, were first made from which small striped fish?

Scientists added a gene for a fluorescent protein; other species followed later.

Svante Paabo won a Nobel Prize in 2022 for reading the DNA of which extinct human relatives?

His work showed that many people today carry a little Neanderthal DNA.

In 2021 scientists read million-year-old DNA, then the oldest known, from what animal?

Ancient DNA usually breaks into tiny pieces, so reading it is like solving a shredded jigsaw; the 2021 mammoth record was passed in 2022 by 2-million-year-old Greenland sediment DNA.

Which molecule carries a copy of a gene's instructions from the DNA to the cell's protein factories?

Some COVID-19 vaccines are made of it, and that idea won a Nobel Prize in 2023.

Which two scientists won the 2023 Nobel Prize for developing mRNA vaccines against COVID-19?

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots were the first mRNA vaccines rolled out to the public.

A change in the DNA sequence, which can happen when a cell copies its DNA wrongly, is called what?

Most mutations do nothing at all; a few cause disease, and a few give useful new traits.

Telomeres are protective caps found where?

Like the plastic tips on shoelaces, they stop the ends of DNA from fraying; their discoverers won a Nobel Prize in 2009.

Bacteria are simpler than our cells; where do they keep their DNA?

Animal and plant cells keep theirs in a nucleus wrapped in a membrane.

When scientists pull pure DNA out of cells in a lab, what does it look like?

You can do a simple version at home with strawberries, salt, dish soap and rubbing alcohol.

Which two bases in DNA are the double-ringed 'purines'?

Thymine and cytosine are the single-ringed pyrimidines; one big base always pairs with one small one so the ladder stays even.

Thomas Hunt Morgan proved that genes sit on chromosomes by studying which tiny creature?

His 'Fly Room' at Columbia University earned him the 1933 Nobel Prize.

Barbara McClintock won a Nobel Prize for discovering 'jumping genes' in which crop plant?

She studied how the coloured kernels of corn changed, and won the prize in 1983.

How many rows does the table of the genetic code have, one for each three-letter 'word'?

Those 64 codons spell out just 20 amino acids plus 'stop' signals, so many words mean the same thing.

Which scientist separated nucleic acid out of 'nuclein' in 1878 and later found its five main bases?

Phoebus Levene later worked out the sugar, phosphate and base units of nucleic acids.

By 1951, which Cambridge chemist's team had worked out how the DNA backbone is put together?

They used biochemical methods to show how the sugar and phosphate units link up, groundwork for the double helix two years later.

Chargaff's rules say the amount of guanine in DNA always equals the amount of which other base?

The same rule holds for adenine and thymine, a clue that helped the Cambridge model-builders work out how the base pairs fit together.

Which 1952 study used a virus called phage T2 to prove DNA is the genetic material?

Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase showed that the virus's DNA, not its protein, went into the bacteria it infected.

Besides DNA, Rosalind Franklin was known in her lifetime for studying viruses and which fuel?

She moved to Birkbeck College in 1953 after falling out with her King's College director John Randall and colleague Maurice Wilkins.

Roughly what share of the human genome had the Human Genome Project read when it was declared complete?

The truly complete genome, with just 0.3% of bases still doubtful, was only achieved in May 2021.