Book of the Month

Bits of Mystery DNA, Far From ‘Junk,’ Play Crucial Role

by artappraiser 9/7/2012 - 2:02 pm

By Gina Kolata, New York Times, September 4/5, 2012

[....] The findings, which are the fruit of an immense federal project involving 440 scientists from 32 laboratories around the world, will have immediate applications for understanding how alterations in the non-gene parts of DNA contribute to human diseases, which may in turn lead to new drugs.

As scientists delved into the “junk” — parts of the DNA that are not actual genes containing instructions for proteins — they discovered a complex system that controls genes. At least 80 percent of this DNA is active and needed. The result of the work is an annotated road map of much of this DNA, noting what it is doing and how [....]

“It’s Google Maps,” said Eric Lander, president of the Broad Institute, a joint research endeavor of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In contrast, the project’s predecessor, the Human Genome Project, which determined the entire sequence of human DNA, “was like getting a picture of Earth from space,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you where the roads are, it doesn’t tell you what traffic is like at what time of the day, it doesn’t tell you where the good restaurants are, or the hospitals or the cities or the rivers.”

The new result “is a stunning resource,” said Dr. Lander, who was not involved in the research that produced it but was a leader in the Human Genome Project. “My head explodes at the amount of data.” [....]

Human DNA is “a lot more active than we expected, and there are a lot more things happening than we expected,” said Ewan Birney of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute, a lead researcher on the project.

In one of the Nature papers, researchers link the gene switches to a range of human diseases — multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, celiac disease — and even to traits like height [....]

Read the full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/science/far-from-junk-dna-dark-matter-proves-crucial-to-health.html?src=me&ref=general

Surprise?

It never made sense to dismiss as 'junk' such a big part of DNA.  

Along the same lines, this story about the tremendous data storage capacity of DNA is interesting.  Makes me wonder what all may be stashed away in mine.

Book written in DNA code | Science | The Guardian

 

by EmmaZahn 9/7/2012 - 5:05 pm

Arta, Emma, you might be interested in this conversation between John Horgan (Stevens Center for Science Writings, Cross-check) and George Johnson (The Cancer Chronicles, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments). The topics include:  Everything you know about "junk DNA" is wrong , Should journalists be more skeptical of scientists?, It depends on what your definition of "junk" is.
 The two science writers critique the subject of junk DNA.  George Johnson believes there is a lot of junk DNA [That is my great over-simplification] and points out, among a great deal of other things, that an onion has five times the DNA in its genome as does a human. Interesting listen.

http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/10563

by A Guy Called LULU 9/8/2012 - 9:08 pm

Thanks for the link, Lulu.  It was informative even though my eyes glazed over a few times and Johnson's penchant for smacking his lips was distracting.   My takeaway was that word choice matters a lot to science writers.   Johnson agreed that most of the 'junk' is probably biochemically active but not necessarily functional as defined in the science papers.  Po-ta-to/Pa-tah-to, I guess.

I don't know.  

bloggingheadtv is not my favorite internet format.  I always feel I could read one or two long posts and learn more in the same time it takes to watch one. bloggingheadstv is to me as Twitter is to Johnson.  Good writers reveal more of themselves there than I care to know about them. laugh

 

by EmmaZahn 9/9/2012 - 7:52 pm (re: A Guy Called LULU)

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