Slashdot Mirror
The One Thousand Genes You Could Live Without
sciencehabit writes Today researchers unveiled the largest ever set of full genomes from a single population: Iceland. The massive project, carried out by a private company in the country, deCODE genetics, has yielded new disease risk genes, insights into human evolution, and a list of more than 1000 genes that people can apparently live without. The project also serves as a model for other countries' efforts to sequence their people's DNA for research on personalized medical care, says study leader Kári Stefánsson, deCODE's CEO. For example, the United States is planning to sequence the genomes of 1 million Americans over the next few years and use the data to devise individualized treatments.
is not evidence of absence. I'll be keeping mine, thanks.
It's good luck to be superstitious
RTFA... they found people with double deletions.
Today's fad is to try and come up with the "perfect" human. Always happy, 200 IQ, and the personality of a turnip as to not be offensive to anyone at any time. Of course they must be orange skinned, no hair, and no gender features (I hope you saw the South Park episode) because if anything visible marked one of them as "different" the project would be a failure. Perfect is quoted, because this perfection is severely subjective and the person who's ideal you are going to meet probably does not match your own.
As you point out, there is no way to know what these apparently unused genes do until we start making modifications. These are pretty dangerous times we live in for many reasons. People believing they are smarter than billions of years of evolution gives me no assurance that these people have a clue, let alone care about modifying people.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
This explains republicans....
(ducks)
careful my dear replicant, those are kernel extensions injected into your DNA by the Sony reverse transciptase root kit. Evidently you are a replicant. Look for the Sony Copyright and your model number to see if you have a null pre-programmed life expectancy.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Any of those genes could encode a protein whose function can be done by another protein that other people may or not express. Obviously the people identified did not need "that" specific protein to do its work but it may be completely possible that a majority of people do not have the compensating gene.
Until experimentation is done to evaluate the need of those genes you can say that those "may" not be indispensable, but saying that apparently they are not needed is too strong a conclusion for the work done.
Most of the junk DNA is still... junk. Basically it's:
1) 60% of the DNA is _definitely_ junk, as they consist of known repeated elements (LINEs, SINEs and others) and defunct genes. This is not an 'absence of evidence', we know exactly how this DNA has happened.
2) Around 10% of DNA is structural. While this is technically not 'junk', this DNA does not encode anything useful.
3) Around 5% are coding sections and regulatory elements.
4) Another 5% of DNA appear to be stable under mutation pressure. So it might have some function.
4) And finally we have around 20% of DNA whose purpose is not known, but we know that random mutations in it do not visibly affect the phenotype.