Of the trillions of cells that compose our body, from neurons that relay signals throughout the brain to immune cells that help defend our bodies from constant external assault, almost every one contains the same 3 billion DNA base pairs that make up the human genome – the entirety of our genetic material. It is remarkable that each of the over 200 cell types in the body interprets this identical information very differently in order to perform the functions necessary to keep us alive. This demonstrates that we need to look beyond the sequence of DNA itself in order to understand how an organism and its cells function.
