CDNA

Okay kiddo, so you know how everything in our body is made up of tiny cells, right? And those cells have important instructions in them called DNA. But sometimes we want to read those instructions and make something from them, like a special protein.

But first, we need to get the instructions out of the cell and into a different kind of cell called a bacterial cell. The bacterial cell has a job to copy the instructions using a special tool called an enzyme. This process is called transcription.

Now that we have a copy of the instructions, we want to use them to make the protein. But the problem is that the DNA instructions are wrapped up really tightly and we can't get to them easily. So we have to coax them out by putting them in a special environment.

That environment is a test tube with some chemicals and enzymes that can reverse the transcription process. It's like undoing a zipper to open up the DNA and make it easier to read.

We call this special copy of the instructions "cDNA" because it's made from RNA (the copy made by the bacterial cell) and not the original DNA. cDNA is really useful because it's a kind of shortcut - we don't have to go through all the steps of getting the DNA instructions out of the cell and then reverse the transcription process. We can just use the cDNA directly to make our protein.

So in summary, cDNA is a copy of the instructions in our DNA that has been made by a bacterial cell and then reversed back to a state that is easy for us to use. It's like a cheat code that helps us make things faster and easier!