• Question: Do Genes actually have any colour???

    Asked by joshjhartley to Anouk, Chris, Judith, Seyyed on 20 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Judith Sleeman

      Judith Sleeman answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      Ermm…I don’t THINK so…..if we look at cells grown in dishes down the microscope using normal white light and without any fancy filters, they just look colourless (there’s a picture on my profile of a cell looking a bit like a fried egg that I took with a colour camera: it’s just grey). If the genes in the nucleus had a colour, I think the nucleus would look coloured.

      I often think of DNA as blue, though, because we often use a dye called DAPI to stain it so we can see it using a fluorescent microscope. We use ultraviolet light to look at the DAPI and the colour we get back from the microscope is blue. On the picture on my profile of a nucleus looking like an easter egg, the blue stuff is the DNA!

    • Photo: Chris Kettle

      Chris Kettle answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      No but the way that they refract light may make it look like they do. The word chromosome comes from the greek for “coloured body” as they looked “coloured” on primative microscopes

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