The nucleus has two major functions, it stores genetic material also known as DNA, and also it controls the cell’s activities which include growth, metabolism and reproduction. The nucleus has organelles inside the cell – small structures that may carry out day-to-day operations of the cell.
The function of the nucleus in an animal cell is hold the genetic blue print of the organism which is the chromatin or as you are probably familiar "the chromosomes" Chromatin are long strands of DNA. DNA is short for deoxyribonucleic acid. Every human cell has 23 chromosomes. DNA is made up of a very long strand of nucleotides arranged in a double helix. There are only four types of nucleotides in a DNA strand, adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine (A C G & T). Another nucleotide is uracil which is found in place of thymine in RNA, more on that later. These four nucleotides are arranged in varying order along the strand. The are a total of 3 billion nucleotides in every human cell. It is the arrangement of these nucleotides along the strand that represents the code for building the proteins which make up the structure of the body. The code is copied from the DNA using RNA ribonucleic acid. The DNA double helix is unwound in specific sections of the DNA strand which contain a specific genetic code or "gene" and RNA strands are formed by nucleotides attaching to the section of unwound DNA. The RNA formed is a mirrored copy of the strand it attached to. The new RNA strand then detaches from the DNA strand and leaves the nucleus of the cell to be used as the template to produce specific proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum of the cell.
