7 ms·
Interesting how entities initially considered more or less as packaging stuff without much use, such as histones and telomeres, turn out to be a lot more than t
by UhUhUhUh 10y ago
Interesting how entities initially considered more or less as packaging stuff without much use, such as histones and telomeres, turn out to be a lot more than that. People, and investors, may tend to focus on the obviously active part of the code and to overlook the architecture.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y agoLike how thr non-coding regions of the genome were termed junk DNA
- fabian2k 10y agoThe term junk DNA is mostly used in popular science media, not by scientists themselves. It was pretty obvious early that some noncoding regions did do something and weren't just junk, but somehow the term still survived.
- dekhn 10y agoLots of scientists use the term junk DNA. I've worked in and around sequencing for 20+ years now and the term in common in arguments about what the function of non-coding regions is.
- knicholes 10y agoIn my introduction to biology class at UVU in 2004 they taught us "junk DNA."
- blisterpeanuts 10y agoMy bio course taught the terms introns and exons. Exons are the portions of DNA that are used to express proteins. Introns correspond to "junk DNA" and are removed prior to protein expression. Their function is not fully understood.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dekhn 10y agoThis is missing a ton of important details. Much of so-called junk DNA is in non-coding regions that are not within introns. For example, there are long regions containing just repetitive viral DNA sequences with no coding DNA anywhere; this is often what people mean when they say junk DNA. But those regions aren't intronic, because they are not spliced out of the preprocessed mRNAs.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y agoIn the textbooks and online resources I used to learn molecular bio, the term junk DNA was used liberally
- tejtm 10y agothe term junk was intended to convey something apparently worth keeping (perhaps in the attic), as opposed to garbage, which is thrown away.
- darpa_escapee 10y agoI feel like evolution would have weeded out significant waste from common systems shared among life. We may have been too quick to throw things we find in the junk pile instead of the "probably don't completely understand how this fits together yet" heap.
- oh_sigh 10y agoI agree with your second point, but not the first. If true waste has very little/no cost associated with it, evolution wouldn't be able to select for it's removal.
- aoeu345 10y agoThat's a great point, though I surmise that there is no waste in the human body. Human's constituents are entirely composed of cells or organelles, and those all consume energy. If there were any cells/organelles that did not contribute at all to the human, he would have a lower performance than humans without the waste, and so evolution would select them out.
- grzm 10y agoI surmise that there is no waste in the human body This is a naive interpretation of evolution. For one, selection doesn't occur instantaneously.
- reubenswartz 10y agoI'm waiting for the onions, with their ability to replicate a genome 5X larger than hours, to suddenly take over. ;-)