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A single change in an amino acid can profoundly affect a protein’s structure and severely disrupt its biological function. This is dramatically illustrated in the hereditary disease sickle cell anemia, a disorder involving hemoglobin. At the molecular level, sickle hemoglobin differs from normal hemoglobin by just one amino acid. In normal hemoglobin, the sixth amino acid in each beta chain is the negatively charged glutamate. This single change may seem minor, but it causes a crucial alteration in the protein’s tertiary structure, which leads to sickling. At the heart of all the complications of sickle cell anemia is a single base alteration: the DNA base triplet CTC, which codes for glutamate in normal hemoglobin, is changed to CAC, which codes for valine. This change in the genetic code is inherited and passed from generation to generation.