The Genome Song

Whenever school gets you down, Master Brown

And science seems hard, or tough

Biology's difficult, obtuse or daft

And you feel that you've had quite enough...

Just remember that you're living in a body that's inspiring

And respiring with ten million million cells

Each one is point-oh-five millimetres side to side

And full of lots of types and kinds of organelles

The nucleus is small - 100 nanometres tall

We make millions of new ones every day

And our chromosomes, it seems, contain 100,000 genes

In a double-stranded helix DNA

Our genome itself contains three billion base pairs

Each one GC or AT side by side

But just one-sixty millions, of those 3.2 billions

Are actually encoding nucleotides

To make one whole protein, it takes but a single gene

Say, fifteen hundred nucleotide pairs

And the whole genetic sequence has millions of billions

Of permutations for our varied life on earth

Our cells and DNA keep on dividing and dividing

Mitosis makes a carbon-copy cell

But so we can reproduce, some cells they will produce

Meiotic'ly a haploid one as well

Two haploids can combine, say, one of yours and one of mine

To create uniquely sequenced DNA

And with this replication comes occasional mutation, so

Evolution comes about this way

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