Weil is less enthusiastic about white, or button, mushrooms, a species of mushroom that also includes Portobellos and criminis. âButton mushrooms do possess some health benefits, but not the general health benefits found in Asian mushrooms,â Weil says.
What sort of information do they encode, and how can this affect a cell's characteristics and activities? Some genes enable cells to make proteins needed for basic functions; dubbed housekeeping genes, they are active in many types of cells. Other genes, however, are inactive most of the time. Some genes play a role in early development of the embryo and are then shut down forever. Many genes encode proteins that are unique to a particular kind of cell and that give the cell its character - making a brain cell, say, different from a bone cell. A normal cell activates just the genes it needs at the moment and actively suppresses the rest.
The DNA also contains large sequences that do not code for any protein and their function is not known. The gene of the coding region encodes instructions that allow a cell to produce a specific protein or enzyme. There are nearly 50,000 and 100,000 genes with each being made up of hundreds of thousands of chemical bases. In order to make proteins, the gene from the DNA is coped by each of the chemical bases into messenger RNA (ribonucleic acid) or mRNA. The mRNA moves out of the nucleus and uses cell organelles in the cytoplasm called ribosomes to form the polypeptide or amino acid that finally folds and configures to form the protein.