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Mystery #3Tier 2cells and dna

If every cell holds the very same DNA, why is a skin cell so different from a brain cell?

Almost every cell in your body carries an identical copy of your DNA, the exact same instruction book. Yet a skin cell and a brain cell could hardly be more different, in shape and in what they do. How can the very same instructions build two cells so unlike each other?

A fluorescent microscope image of nerve cells: blue cell bodies clustered together with orange and magenta fibres radiating outwards, with a 50 micrometre scale bar.
Photo: ZEISS Microscopy · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Your guess

Same instruction book in every cell, yet the cells come out so different. What's your hunch about how that happens?

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