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Junk DNA is a phrase biologists use for describing the long held (and recently disproven) idea that non-coding DNA ("dna not coding for proteins") is unimportan
by stanfordkid 8y ago
Junk DNA is a phrase biologists use for describing the long held (and recently disproven) idea that non-coding DNA ("dna not coding for proteins") is unimportant relative to coding regions (genes).
Most non-coding DNA does have a regulatory purpose. Things like copy number variations (where information is "duplicated") between promoters and enhancers can can change the rate at which particular genes get transcribed. This is my point: that viewing the genome as "information" in the simple sense of each ATCG nucleotide corresponding to bits is absurd. The genome is a geometric AND chemical entity and encodes information using both paradigms.
My point is not to say that you are wrong, but rather that you do not know. It is FAR from well established that the genome is inefficient at storing information.
- mannykannot 8y agoI don't know, you don't know, but only one of us is using speculative arguments (and, in at least one earlier case, fantasy, as lake99 pointed out above) to support her opinion. From an information-theoretic point of view (which is where we started) even if all non-coding DNA had some purpose, it would not be a sufficient basis for assuming that it is close to the most information-theoretically efficient implementation. On the other hand, the fact that whole genomes can be handily compressed, with straightforward Huffman encoding techniques, settles the infomation-theoretic efficiency question, regardless of whether your speculation about the usefulness of all non-coding DNA is correct.