
When such an edit happens, it can change how the proteins work, allowing the organism to fine-tune its genetic information without actually undergoing any genetic mutations. You can think of DNA instructions as a recipe, while RNA is the chef that orchestrates the cooking in the kitchen of each cell, producing necessary proteins that keep the whole organism going.īut RNA doesn't just blindly execute instructions - occasionally it improvises with some of the ingredients, changing which proteins are produced in the cell in a rare process called RNA editing.

Those genetic changes are then translated into action by DNA's molecular sidekick, RNA. When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation - a change to the DNA. This is weird because that's really not how adaptations usually happen in multicellular animals.
