cos 67 may be a prophet, part 4

Now, I'm no geneticist, but :

A few years ago i did a story where I
made fun of Richard Dawkins and played
up the planet of the apes, all with the
message that DNA research had not
reached what I would call it's
piece de la resistance.

If we humans are 95% like the common
mouse, then DNA, as we know it, is
not the answer to life. There's got to be more.

Well, here's the proof. As always, it's in the
stuff that everybody threw away as junk.

checkit: from Hang the bankers

Scientists discover “junk” DNA has uses

07 Sep 2012

by Jacque Fresco

For decades more than 98 percent of our genetic code was dismissively labeled “junk” DNA. But a massive new study shows that it actually plays a crucial role – a discovery that could revolutionize science and medicine.

We know that only 1.2 per cent of our genetic code contains specific instructions for how to synthesize proteins that create the cells that make us who we are.

As for the rest? It was assumed to be useless baggage, or at the very least, its function wasn’t obvious.

In 2003 a $120 million project called Encode was launched to find out what, if anything, is happening in the rest of the DNA. It united more than 400 scientists in over 30 labs all around the world.

The results were published in 30 different scientific papers this week, and have blown up our understanding of the gene.

The rest of the DNA may be regulatory elements, or using a simple metaphor, switches.

“Regulatory elements are the things that turn genes on and off,” says Professor Mike Snyder of Stanford University, a principal investigator in Encode “Much of the difference between people is due to the differences in the efficiency of these regulatory elements. There are more variants, we think, in the regulatory elements than in the genes themselves.”

“I don’t think anyone predicted that would be the case,” says Dr. Bradley Bernstein, an Encode researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Encode claims that 80 percent of all DNA seems to have some biological function.

“These parts of the DNA have important implications for the growth and development of embryos and foetuses during pregnancy. These are the kinds of elements that make your tissues and organs grow properly, at the right time and place, and containing the right kinds of cells,” says Anne Ferguson-Smith of Cambridge University.

They also regulate the predisposition towards illnesses like cancer, diabetes and Crohn’s disease.

Tim Hubbard of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge gives an example: “We know that breast cancer is not one disease but there’s multiple types of breast cancer with all sorts of different mechanistic processes going wrong.”