Question: Do diseased genes look different from healthy ones?

Matthew Bainbridge answered on 8 Mar 2017:

Sort of… Imagine a gene is a recipe, well a gene that makes you sick will have a mistake in the recipe somewhere (like using salt instead of sugar). Usually genes that can make you sick are SOOOO important that there are almost never any mistake sin them in healthly people. So what we do is that we read the genes from lots and lots of healthy people, and figure out what genes have almost no differences/mistakes. Then if we see a mistake in someone who is sick, that is a clue that that recipe is causing the sickness.