Secondary School Education Materials

What Does DNA do?

With all the billions of people in the world it is amazing to think that we are all different. When we are born, each of us grows according to a unique set of instructions that are inside every cell in our body. All living things are made of cells – they’re like small packets of life.

Inside each cell is a nucleus where the instructions are stored. This instruction manual is called DNA and contains all the information needed to make you, you. DNA provides the instructions to make proteins? which are the building blocks of life and carry out lots of different functions to make us work!

Script developed by Maria A Duque-Correa, Susanna Repo and the students of Great and Little Shelford Primary school.

Animation by Bob Banks (Bob Banks animation studio)

This resource is made available from yourgenome.org managed the Wellcome Sanger Institute. It has been adapted for this website under Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0