“Junk DNA could unlock new treatments for neurological disorders as scientists discover its breaks and repairs affect our protection against neurological disease.”
‘Junk DNA’
At Phys.org: Synthetic tools conduct messages from station to station in DNA
“Rice University bioengineers are using deactivated Cas9 proteins to target key segments of the human genome and synthetically trigger the transcription of human genes.”
At Mind Matters News: Jumping genes … a new clue to octopus intelligence?
Formerly thought of as “junk DNA,” their mobility may help explain unique problem-solving abilities. “I literally jumped on the chair…” one researcher said.
New distinctions help accommodate researchers to the usefulness of “junk DNA”
Researchers: With the special case of junk DNA in mind, we explore how to model and understand the causal specificity, reach, and corresponding efficacy of difference makers in biology.
Rebranding some junk DNA as spam DNA
Perhaps science is a bit more like business than we think. In business, products get rebranded when vice presidents outnumber customers for the old brand.
Intelligent Design=Pattern Recognition
This Phys.Org press release isn’t about a particularly interesting scientific paper. However, what the authors tells us about how this paper came to be is very interesting. And, I may add, very revealing. Listen to what they have to say about their “aha” moment: Inside some of the data that a standard mapping algorithm normally Read More…
Someone out there is actually defending junk DNA
Can someone please tell them, the Titanic has sunk — its seaworthiness is no longer an issue?
Ah, A real-world term for former “junk DNA”
And the winner is “genomic dark matter”: “Most DNA in the human genome still has unknown functions and is referred to as “genomic dark matter.”
New use for “junk DNA”: Controlling fear
Okay, why, until recently, did researchers think that “the majority of our genes were made up of junk DNA, which essentially didn’t do anything”? Because that vast sunken library of dead information (sheer randomness and waste) was a slam dunk for Darwinism, as politically powerful theistic evolutionist Francis Collins was quick to point out in The Language of God. (2007). If that’s not true, an argument for Darwinism is disconfirmed.
A new, useful, description for (former) junk DNA… ?
“the large proportion of our genome that does not instruct our cells to form proteins” The phrase is a bit longish, of course, but concision is usually a product of usage. It’s better than “non-coding DNA” because it’s more specific and limited as a privative. That is, there is a specific thing that that vast mass of DNA does not do. The longish phrase does not come with the implication that it doesn’t do anything.
Junking more claims around junk DNA
Apparently, repeated sequences have a function: “Marshall explains that previous technology that was used to sequence the human genome made scientists “blind” to the fact that such sequences are, in fact, useful.”
At Scientific American: Salamander “junk DNA” challenges long-held view of evolution
Douglas Fox at SciAm: The salamanders would be on death’s door if they were human. “Everything about having a large genome is costly,” Wake told me in 2020. Yet salamanders have survived for 200 million years. “So there must be some benefit,” he said. The hunt for those benefits has led to some heretical surprises, potentially turning our understanding of evolution on its head.
At Evolution News: Darwin in the schools campaigner got it all wrong on pseudogenes
When you think about it, it’s a better long-term strategy to predict that something has function than that it doesn’t.
CalTech researchers map spatial organization of the (“junk”) DNA and RNA in the cell nucleus
At ENST: Now, the windows are opening on [nucleus] organization so all-encompassing for all those non-coding RNA transcripts, it is truly mind-boggling what goes on in the nucleus of a cell.