NDA GK Questions 2026

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, founded in 1954, has its campus at Meyrin on the outskirts of Geneva in Switzerland, and because its tunnels run under the border, parts of the laboratory lie in France as well.

The Large Hadron Collider occupies a circular tunnel about 27 kilometres around, lying roughly 100 metres below the ground on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, and it is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built; the tunnel was originally dug for an earlier CERN machine, the Large Electron-Positron…

Bt cotton carries genes from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, which make the plant produce a protein toxic to bollworm larvae.

The Genome India Project was launched in January 2020 by the Department of Biotechnology, which works under the Ministry of Science and Technology, and brings together about twenty academic institutions to sequence Indian genomes and build a reference set that reflects the country's genetic diversity.

The Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics was established in 1995 as an autonomous institution of the Department of Biotechnology and works at Hyderabad on DNA fingerprinting services, diagnostics of genetic disorders and research in genomics.

In the Watson and Crick model the two strands are held together by hydrogen bonds between complementary bases: adenine pairs with thymine through two hydrogen bonds and guanine pairs with cytosine through three.

The polymerase chain reaction, invented by Kary Mullis in 1983, repeats three steps: the DNA is denatured near ninety-five degrees Celsius, short primers anneal at a lower temperature, and the strand is extended at about seventy-two degrees.

The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 as an international public effort coordinated in the United States by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, with laboratories in several countries taking part.

Each nucleotide of DNA carries a phosphate group, and the phosphate backbone gives the whole molecule a net negative charge at the pH used in the laboratory.

Cas9 is an enzyme that breaks the sugar-phosphate backbone of both DNA strands at the point where its guide RNA has bound, provided a short adjacent signal called the PAM is present.

The two scientists showed that the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 system could be directed by a designed guide RNA to cut any chosen sequence of DNA, which turned a microbial defence mechanism into a general tool for editing genomes, and they shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.

Working at the University of Leicester in 1984, Alec Jeffreys found that certain short sequences, the minisatellites or variable number tandem repeats, repeat a different number of times in different people, and that a pattern made from them identifies an individual.

Connell showed in the field that on the intertidal rocks of the Scottish coast the larger and faster-growing barnacle Balanus physically crowds out the smaller Chathamalus wherever the two settle together, so that Chathamalus survives only higher up the shore where Balanus cannot tolerate the exposure.

In a mycorrhiza the threads of a fungus grow around or inside the fine roots of a plant and greatly extend the surface from which minerals, especially phosphorus, can be absorbed from the soil.

Brood parasitism is the habit of laying eggs in the nest of another species and letting the host bird incubate them and feed the young.

In amensalism one species is harmed while the other neither gains nor loses, a pattern written as minus and zero.

Rhizobium lives inside the nodules on the roots of legumes such as gram, pea, groundnut and arhar. The bacterium converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, a form the plant can absorb and build into proteins, while the plant supplies the bacterium with shelter and with sugars made in photosynthesis.

Robert Paine removed the predatory starfish Pisaster from rocky intertidal pools and found that within a short time the mussels it had been eating took over the rock surface and crowded out other animals, so that more than ten invertebrate species were lost from the pools.

The Russian ecologist G. F. Gause worked with cultures of Paramecium and concluded that when two species need exactly the same limited resource in the same space, one of them is always eliminated in the long run; this is the competitive exclusion principle, also called Gause's principle.

Prickly pear cactus was taken to Australia in the nineteenth century and spread uncontrollably over grazing land because no local animal fed on it.