Review of "Back to the Basics: Genetics & DNA" by Tara Rodden Robinson and Lisa Cushman Spock

“Back to the Basics: Genetics & DNA” by Tara Rodden Robinson and Lisa Cushman Spock is the best guide to learning and remembering how your cells carry out the most basic functions that make you, you! Covering topics including what your cells look like, how genetics works and traits are passed down, what deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and its cousin ribonucleic acid (RNA) look like, and how your genes affect your health and your world, this book has it all. Having taken biology in school last year, I was extremely familiar with many of the concepts discussed. However, the book went into even more depth than I learned about last year, which was very interesting. The book helped me connect real-world concepts and issues to what I was learning about biology from the book.

Chapter 1 essentially convinces the reader to read this book– and it's very persuasive. It gives the definitions of the most basic biological concepts that will be discussed in the book and demonstrates why they are important. Chapter 2 discusses cell biology– how a cell is made up, the two types of cells (eukaryotes and prokaryotes), and how the cells split through mitosis for somatic (body) cells and through meiosis for gametes (sex cells).

With the basic foundation laid, chapters 3 and 4 discuss biologist Gregor Mendel's laws for inheritance. Chapter 3 discusses how these work with simple traits, using the typical punnet square model to describe genetic inheritance, while chapter 4 dives deeper to explain concepts such as codominance (where both alleles of genes are expressed as phenotypes) and incomplete dominance (where the two alleles are combined to make a new phenotype, e.g. a red flower and yellow flower creating an orange flower). Chapter 5 continues the discussion of genetics and inheritance by talking about our X and Y chromosomes, sex-determination in humans and other animals, and sex-determination disorders.

Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the two most important nucleic acids, DNA and RNA. Every single organism, prokaryote or eukaryote, human or bacterium, has DNA as the basis of its genetic model, and in many cases between species of organisms, our DNA is very similar. While DNA is double-stranded and forms the famous double helix shape, RNA is most often single-stranded and differs slightly from DNA, most notably using uracil as one of its four nitrogenous bases instead of thymine, making DNA more stable. These two chapters also discuss the critical topic of the replication of DNA and transcription of DNA onto messenger RNA (abbreviated to mRNA). Chapter 8 discusses the next step after transcription, the incredibly complex and fascinating step of genetic translation. Translating the mRNA with the help of rRNA (ribosomal RNA) and tRNA (transfer RNA), the mRNA becomes amino acids one codon at a time and eventually forms an amino acid chain, otherwise known as a protein, the basic building block of how we express all our phenotypes. Chapters 9 and 10 discuss how genetics and DNA can affect our health and can affect the world as a whole.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in biology, taking a biology course, or anyone who needs a little review on one of the most fascinating and important topics of how and why life exists.