Thought this was interesting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/s...-dark-matter-proves-crucial-to-health.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/s...-dark-matter-proves-crucial-to-health.html?hp
Welcome to Phoenix Rising!
Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of, and finding treatments for, complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
To become a member, simply click the Register button at the top right.
The scale of the problem is what I find astonishing. The part of the genome which codes for proteins is about 2% of the total. The "junk DNA" found active in regulation is now put at 80%, 40 times the DNA most researchers have typically been studying.
One more point, one reason researchers labeled sequences as junk was that a high percentage resembled viral sequences. Some of these can be identified as retroviral sequences or retrotransposons (transposable elements). Surprisingly, other sequences are from viruses not known to be retroviruses. It appears that ordinary viruses can insert sequences if retroviruses or retrotransposons are also active. We find sequences from both DNA viruses and RNA viruses among the junk.
I'm still waiting for someone to explain why biological processes have to follow rules that humans find convenient.
Quite so. It seems that what this is looking like is the explanation for why there are unexpectedly few genes in the human genome: this additional layer of complex rules for how those genes are used is a whole other layer on top of the genome. Ever since I first heard the term "junk DNA" I've been waiting for the crucial role of "junk" DNA to be uncovered, and it always seemed that it would be roughly along these lines (as a programmer, the genes seemed rather like subroutines and I guessed that the "junk" might be the actual program) so this breakthrough isn't exactly a shock to me. But unravelling so much of the detail seems like a massively important development.This is something that was being intensely discussed in 2000 when I was studying biochem. Many thought it would turn out to be very significant - they were right. Classical genes are just protein instructions. Put a hundred thousand types of proteins in a pot, 21000 protein encoding genes, stir, and you don't get a human being. The rules for how to use those proteins, and other RNA that has been ignored to a large extent in research, is what makes much of the difference. Bye, Alex
There is another sort of hairball as well: the complex three-dimensional structure of DNA. Human DNA is such a long strand — about 10 feet of DNA stuffed into a microscopic nucleus of a cell — that it fits only because it is tightly wound and coiled around itself. When they looked at the three-dimensional structure — the hairball — Encode researchers discovered that small segments of dark-matter DNA are often quite close to genes they control. In the past, when they analyzed only the uncoiled length of DNA, those controlling regions appeared to be far from the genes they affect.