‘Junk DNA’

From David Klinghoffer at ENST, on Darwinism and the recent find that junk DNA can alter genitalia: The “junk” view, once a prized piece of evidence for neo-Darwinian theory, is thus reduced to the province of the benighted, the reactionaries who “still refer to [it] as ‘junk’ DNA,” after science has already passed them by. Having volumes of garbage lying around was a logical prediction of Darwinism that is in the process of being falsified. Now, it seems likely that non-coding regions have not trivial but “drastic effects.” This reversal helps explain why evolutionists like Richard Dawkins have radically revised a key claim. Dawkins himself, in the space of three years, went from assuring us that junk validates Darwinism to claiming Read More ›

From at ScienceDaily: Mammals will develop ovaries and become females unless the early sex organs have enough of a protein called SOX9 at a key stage in their development. SOX9 causes these organs to become testes, which then direct the rest of the embryo to become male. The amount of SOX9 produced is controlled initially by the SRY protein encoded by the Sry gene, which is located on the Y chromosome. This is why males, who have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome, usually develop testes while females, who have two X chromosomes, do not. Only 2% of human DNA contains the ‘code’ to produce proteins, key building blocks of life. The remaining 98% is ‘non-coding’ and was once Read More ›

From Veronique Greenwood at Quanta: By knocking out genes three at a time, scientists have painstakingly deduced the web of genetic interactions that keeps a cell alive. Researchers long ago identified essential genes that yeast cells can’t live without, but new work, which appears today in Science, shows that looking only at those gives a skewed picture of what makes cells tick: Many genes that are inessential on their own become crucial as others disappear. The result implies that the true minimum number of genes that yeast — and perhaps, by extension, other complex organisms — need to survive and thrive may be surprisingly large. … “Perhaps what we’re sampling here,” Andrews said, “are some functional connections in the cell Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Their findings, published recently in the journal eLife, indicate that this genetic “junk” performs the vital function of ensuring that chromosomes bundle correctly inside the cell’s nucleus, which is necessary for cell survival. And this function appears to be conserved across many species. This pericentromeric satellite DNA consists of a very simple, highly repetitive sequence of genetic code. Although it accounts for a substantial portion of our genome, satellite DNA does not contain instructions for making any specific proteins. What’s more, its repetitive nature is thought to make the genome less stable and more susceptible to damage or disease. Until fairly recently, scientists believed this so-called “junk” or “selfish” DNA did not serve any real purpose. “But we Read More ›

From Adam Hargreaves at New Scientist, No doubt you have heard of dark matter, which is thought to make up over a quarter of the universe. We know it’s there; we just haven’t been able to detect it. Well, something similar is afoot in the genome. My colleagues and I have dubbed this elusive genetic matter “dark DNA”. And our investigations into the sand rat are starting to reveal its nature. The discovery of dark DNA is so recent that we are still trying to work out how widespread it is and whether it benefits those species that possess it. However, its very existence raises some fundamental questions about genetics and evolution. We may need to look again at how Read More ›

From Sal Cordova at Creation-Evolution Headlines: Chris Rupe co-authored the book Contested Bones with John Sanford to tell about the inadequate evidence for human evolution. The book is almost entirely about bones and the fossil record, but there are 3 pages in that book that refute claims by evolutionary biologists that the human genome is badly designed because of repetitive DNA elements known as Alus. Some 10-11% of the human genome is composed of repeats of specific 300-base pattern called an Alu. Evolutionists claim this is bad design. Their reasoning goes something like this: ‘You only need one copy of a phone book in a house, maybe a few at most, certainly not millions of copies. Therefore the 1 million Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists have found an explanation for how flowering plants became dominant so rapidly in ecosystems across the world — a problem that Charles Darwin called an ‘abominable mystery’. In a study publishing on January 11 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, Kevin Simonin and Adam Roddy, from San Francisco State University and Yale University respectively, found that flowering plants have small cells relative to other major plant groups and that this small cell size is made possible by a greatly reduced genome size. … This new research provides a mechanism. By scouring the literature for data, the authors argue that these anatomical innovations are directly linked to the size of their genome. Because each cell has to Read More ›

Philosopher Étienne Gilson (1884–1978): A scientist never begins by defining the method of the science he is about to initiate. Indeed, the surest way of recognizing false sciences is by the fact that they make the method come first. The method, however, should derive from the science, not the science from the method.” – Etienne Gilson, Methodical Realism. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011, p. 100. Evolution does not exist in order to make Darwin right. One thinks here of molecular evolutionist Dan Graur’s war cry: “… if ENCODE is right, then evolution is wrong. ENCODE argues that there is not much “junk” in our DNA. Graur disagrees. How about: Either ENCODE or Graur could be wrong but the facts are never Read More ›

From Nicholas S. Heaton & Bryan R. Cullen at Nature: Long non-coding RNAs (non-coding RNAs more than 200 nucleotides long) have roles in many aspects of cell biology4,5. In the nucleus, they are involved in transcriptional regulation and remodelling of chromosomes, and in the cytoplasm, they regulate microRNA function as well as the translation of mRNAs to generate proteins. But there are scores of lncRNAs whose functions have not been identified, so there are potentially many more roles to uncover. … If it is indeed true that viral replication and normal host-cell physiology have major differences in terms of the metabolic intermediates and enzymes they require, then exciting possibilities for the development of broadly acting antiviral therapies clearly exist. More generally, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Duplications of large segments of noncoding [junk] DNA in the human genome may have contributed to the emergence of differences between humans and nonhuman primates, according to results presented at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) 2017 Annual Meeting in Orlando, Fla. Identifying these duplications, which include regulatory sequences, and their effect on traits and behavior may help scientists explain genetic contributions to human disease. Paulina Carmona-Mora, PhD, who presented the work; Megan Dennis, PhD; and their colleagues at the University of California, Davis, study the history of human-specific duplications (HSDs), segments of DNA longer than 1,000 base pairs that are repeated in humans but not in primates or other animals. In this study, they focused on Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers from the Institute of Population Genetics at Vetmeduni Vienna, using a new and highly specific analysis method, could now provide fresh momentum to help decode the evolutionary dynamics of the Y chromosome. Their study shows that ten times more new genes are transferred onto the Y chromosome in fruit flies than had been previously thought. Some of these new genes even appear to have taken on important functions. … A special surprise for the research team was that four of the 25 newly transferred genes on the Y chromosome have already assumed an important function there. “As these new genes can be found in all individuals of a species, the question arises as to which functions these Read More ›

From Mario Aguilera at U San Diego News: Intricate human physiological features such as the immune system require exquisite formation and timing to develop properly. Genetic elements must be activated at just the right moment, across vast distances of genomic space. “Promoter” areas, locations where genes begin to be expressed, must be paired precisely with “enhancer” clusters, where cells mature to a targeted function. Faraway promoters must be brought in proximity with their enhancer counterparts, but how do they come together? When these elements are not in sync, diseases such as leukemia and lymphoma can result. How does this work? Biologists at the University of California San Diego believe they have the answer. Calling it the “big bang” of immune Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Gene therapy using ‘junk DNA’ could lower risk for heart disease Scientists from UCLA and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute successfully used a gene that suppresses cholesterol levels as part of a treatment to reduce plaque in mice with a disorder called familial hypercholesterolemia. In a preclinical study, researchers found that the gene, LeXis, lowered cholesterol and blockages in the arteries, and the treatment appeared to reduce the build-up of fat in liver cells. Familial hypercholesterolemia is an inherited condition characterized by extremely high levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (commonly referred to as “bad cholesterol”) and an increased risk of early heart disease. The LeXis gene belongs to a unique group of genes that until recently were considered Read More ›

From Jun-An Chen and Simon Conn at Genome Biology: Abstract: A report on the Second Aegean International Conference on the Long and the Short of Non-Coding RNAs, held in Heraklion, Greece, 9–14 June 2017. Investigations into gene regulation and disease pathogenesis have been protein-centric for decades. However, in recent years there has been a profound expansion in our knowledge of the variety and complexity of eukaryotic RNA species, particularly the non-coding RNA families. Vast amounts of RNA sequencing data generated from various library preparation methods have revealed these non-coding RNA species to be unequivocally more abundant than canonical mRNA species. Furthermore, insight into the diverse mechanisms and functional roles of these RNA transcripts is emerging, pointing to their roles in Read More ›

From Catherine Offord at the Scientist: Circular RNAs (circRNAs) have attracted growing attention in recent years, but their function in living organisms has long remained a mystery. Now, researchers report that one circRNA, Cdr1as, regulates microRNA levels in the mammalian brain, and that its removal results in abnormal neuronal activity and behavioral impairments in mice. The findings were published today (August 10) in Science. “There are few papers where you can really say it’s a breakthrough,” says Sebastian Kadener, a neuroscientist and circRNA researcher at Brandeis University who was not involved in the work. “But this paper is really exciting. It’s the first real demonstration of a function of these molecules in vivo in an animal.”More. A breakthrough now but Read More ›