Question: Does A-T C-G come in to your work? if so, how do you use it?

Claire Shooter answered on 17 Jun 2014:

You mean the genetic code itself? Yes, I use it every day!
Think of the genetic code like a computer program. Instead of being written in 0’s and 1’s it written in A’s , G’s, C’s and T’s. I’m basically a code checker, looking for typos in the code which cause bugs in the program. I take DNA from patients, ‘sequence’ it to get the A/G/C/T code they have and compare it to a reference sequence of the human genome (which is based on the sequence of a group of normal people with no genetic conditions) and look for positions where they are different which might have caused the disease.
I just use this to tell patients what disease they have, and we can work out the best way to treat them based on our experience of other people with the same disease. Other researchers may use this sort of information to look for ways to better understand the disease, or try and develop ways to cure it.
If you like, you can take a look at the human genome yourself here: http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgGateway?redirect=manual&source=genome-euro.ucsc.edu
just type in a position on a chromosome or a gene, and you can zoom out to see big genome features like genes and repeats, or zoom in to see the sequence base by base