Can genomes change?
Genomes change - between generations or over a lifetime - these changes are called mutations. Mutations can be helpful, harmful or make no difference at all.
You can inherit mutations from your parents. Mutations are also happening in your cells all the time. Environmental factors like smoking and sunlight can increase the rate of DNA mutation in your cells.
Mutations can happen anywhere in the DNA - in the noncoding DNA as well as the coding DNA of our genes. Many mutations will do nothing at all because they occur outside the important coding and noncoding regions of our DNA.
At this stage, we know most about mutations that we can detect. These are the relatively few mutations that directly cause disease or an obvious change in the way our bodies work. In the future, researchers expect to learn more about mutations with small or indirect effects. For example, small changes that switch a gene on at the wrong time, or mean that not quite enough protein is produced, could contribute to complex diseases like diabetes or hypertension.
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