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I’ll tell
you what DOESN’T work: using all your savings to buy
your genes plane tickets to Hawaii, and watching them hang
out on the beach for a few weeks trying to get themselves
a nice shade of golden-bronze. Golden-bronze?!? Hah! Not likely!
Not only do they not tan any better, they don’t even
pay their share of the hotel room!
But I have heard
of a special sunscreen under development... See, UV exposure
from the sun changes the DNA in your skin cells and that can
lead to skin cancer. So, we need pretty good sunscreen to
protect us on those bright sunny days at the beach (or anywhere
else for that matter). Now, imagine a sunscreen that uses
DNA bits that protect you by helping your skin repair itself!
This DNA sunscreen
has something in it called thymidine dinucleotide (pTT). These
are small bits of DNA that can boost the cells’ repair
pathways so that they remove more of the damaged bits of your
DNA after UV exposure. The theory is that you’d be able
to tan longer and better if the pTT was protecting your skin
from those nasty cancer-causing sunrays. Researchers are working
on the sunscreen now – but they’re still a long
way off from selling the recipe to your local drugstore. So
until then, make sure you keep yourself well protected when
out in the sun!
Check out the article on DNA
sunscreen.
Wanna learn more about DNA
base pairs? Check out the glossary.
April 2007
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