Genetics

When I started my journey of learning about inheritance, mutation, and genetics I had very little prior knowledge. I had thought inheritance was a simple process of just receiving your parent's genes, which is far from the truth. I always thought mutations had to be a complex process and viewed them in only the aspects of cancer cells. 

Through my academic career, I started slowly learning about these different concepts. Through biology and genetic classes, I learned about the intense variation in genes and inheritance due to our genome which is made up of genes. You can find variation across the human genome in various places. This lead to my discovery of the structure of DNA and the base pairs that make up the extraordinary variation. Throughout learning more about DNA and its structure, I started to also learn about mutations. I saw that mutations were simply a change in base pairs. If these base-pair lead to an alteration in the amino acid, this could cause a mutation to occur. Mutations did not always have to be harmful but could be synonymous which means they do not alter the amino acid. This led to the realization that there is not simply "one type" of mutations, but multiple. My knowledge of these subjects did not exactly have an "AH-HA!" moment but slowly started to piece together the more classes and in-depth we delved into the topics. This is what I enjoy about science, all the subjects sort of link together like a puzzle piece and you can discover the overall big picture. 

Though, I am constantly learning and still have so much to further understand. Some topics that are not crystal clear include different types of mutations such as insertions, fissions, and fusions.