2 ms·
I thought what used to be called "junk DNA" was now thought to be regulatory instructions?
by perl4ever 7y ago
I thought what used to be called "junk DNA" was now thought to be regulatory instructions?
- dekhn 7y agoParts of DNA contain regulatory instructions and other very vague signals. Vast regions of it are just repetitive sequence that probably does not have any functional effect. What hasn't been explained: why is there so much "unproductive RNA production"- that is, RNA that gets transcribed from DNA regions that appear to have no functional contribution. Also not explained: why is there functional selection on regions that seem not to produce anything "useful"? People have proposed taking genomes and replacing all the parts that aren't under functional selection with random DNA, and showing the organism is still viable. Other folks have proposed cutting out those parts. Nobody has run a convincing experiment on a higher animal to show this is possible, or that the results are convincing in any way.