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New Genes May Arise From Junk DNA
An anonymous reader writes: Junk DNA (or noncoding DNA) is a term for section of a DNA strand that doesn't actually do much. Huge tracts of the human genome consist of junk DNA, and researchers are now finding that it may be more useful than previously thought. "For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that [gene duplication] was the primary way new genes were born — they simply arose from copies of existing genes. The old version went on doing its job, and the new copy became free to evolve novel functions. Certain genes, however, seem to defy that origin story. They have no known relatives, and they bear no resemblance to any other gene. ... But in the past few years, a once-heretical explanation has quickly gained momentum — that many of these orphans arose out of so-called junk DNA."
That's always been the key to genetic evolution. This is somehow new??
Scientists haven't thought "junk" DNA as junk for years. It's a shorthand expression for genes that have no obvious expression, though they've known for a long time that junk DNA may have regulatory functions, and that most certainly junk DNA is a potential seed bed of evolution because the likelihood of deleterious mutations in junk DNA sequences is much lower.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As I said, it's a fairly unremarkable finding. I remember references to junk DNA sequences having the potential to be expressed in the early 1990s.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.