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New Class of Genes Discovered
HarryGenes writes "Reuters is reporting that Scientists Find New Type of Gene in Junk DNA. The research from Harvard Medical School describes a discovery in the Yeast Genome of a new class of gene that regulates the neighboring gene through the production of its RNA product. This has much broader implications than the article lets on to. Assuming these same type of genes exist in Humans and other organisms, the whole science behind gene expression and gene mapping will be changed dramatically. This type of mechanism can explain a lot of the 'unexplainable'. This is really exciting. I have been working in gene mapping for years and always felt that the 'junk' was there for a reason."
As usual, the quality of a mainstream news outlet reporting on science news is bad. This really has nothing to do with 'junk DNA' from what I can tell. Also, the term 'junk DNA' is terrible.
There are repeats (sometimes referred to as 'junk DNA') and there are introns and intergenic regions with no *known* function (also referred to as 'junk DNA').
So while it is technically true that the gene was found in 'junk DNA', it's also true that EVERY new gene is found in junk DNA. That is not what is interesting here at all.
Basically, they found a gene that turns another gene on or off via it's RNA product. This is what the intereseting news is.
And yet there are people prepared to unleash modified genes on the world saying that they **know** there is no risk.
Every time somebody has a child they "unleash modified genes on the world". When people say that there is no risk, they mean there's no risk above and beyond normal behaviour.
I don't **know** that the meat I am eating is free of mad cow disease. I don't really care though because I live with one a few billion odds.
There is certainly a risk involved with genetically modified things. Hell, we know this for a fact because we have been doing it for hundreds of years through more primitive means, and we have screwed up in the past. That said, there comes a point when you need to go over your fear and dive in. We will never know anything for sure, and pretty sure is good enough most of the time. I am pretty sure I am not going to die in a car accident on the way to work each morning and that is good enough for me.
Now, there are plenty of reasons to be weary of modified plants and animals, but all of them are patenting and legal issues. As to the raw science of it though, such concerns are negligible with enough foresight. I don't know about you, but I would merrily risk two or three people in an entire population dying because genetically modified super corn gives them an allergic reaction then watch a few hundred thousand people die because their refuse to grow in the barren land that they live.
People need to put a careful eye to potential risks and rewards. Humans are horribly crafty bastards. Sure, we screw up for time to time, but we are not all that bad at dealing with the consequences. If you need any proof that we fix things more then we break them, you need only look at the average human life expectancy has changed over time.
The more I heard about genetic codes, the more they resemble certain thigns in the computer world to me. Probably convergent evolution of sorts. Sounds like they've been staring at an incomprehensible data-set they were examining byte by byte to understand where the data was stored in what format. They found isolated bits that matched up and identified their purpose, but large amounts of the code remained a mystery. Then with this discovery, they just realized that they're actually staring at a huge peice of mixed data and code (probably in some cases dual-purpose bits which are both data and code) - just like in the computer case. Well, not so much in a high level language's case, but remember when people used to write ultra-compact self-modifying code/data in asm? When you think about it, for any given computing problem that can be solved by some chunk of code and data, the most space-efficient hyper-optimal way to do it usually ends up being self-modifying assembler "code", which re-uses code for data and data for code where possible.
It is of course mind-bogglingly complex to write code in this fashion for any sufficiently complex software, which is why we only tend to have examples of this on very small scales (tiny little DOS programs and simple virii back then).
But.. if that's the most efficient way to pack the functionality into a small space - and if writing DNA is similar in nature to writing assembler code - then evolution would naturally gravitate towards this method of encoding, eventually becoming such a complex self-modifying code/data mess that it causes us all these problems trying to unravel it.
11*43+456^2
I think that might be the crucial factor there. After all, how can we effectively measure things that we're just starting to discover?