For Doctor, JUNK DNA

[michael barry]

This article is VERY interesting:


Article:
So-called junk DNA might regulate the activity of the genes they surround

Anjana Ahuja:


Itstrickytounderstandthissentenceisntit? If you pluck the punctuation out of a sentence, it becomes much harder to read. Biologists now suspect that some stretches of DNA in the human genome that were previously thought to be useless might serve as punctuation between genes.

Your genome – the genetic material that makes you, you – is made up of genes and so-called junk DNA. Genes are the instruction manuals that your body uses to make proteins. But genes constitute only 4 per cent of the genome. The rest – the junk DNA – appears to serve no useful purpose. In the jargon, it doesn’t code for anything. This is puzzling, because scientists thought that evolution would fine-tune the human genome to preserve the essential bits and discard the rest.

Now an international team of scientists has discovered that junk DNA might regulate the activity of the genes they surround. While genes do the hard work of making proteins, the junk DNA could be responsible for starting and stopping protein production. “Some of the junk DNA might be considered punctuation marks – commas and full stops that help make sense of the coding portion of the genome,†says Dr Victoria Lunyak, of the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, one of the authors of a paper published in Science. Another analogy is to think of genes as building labourers, and the surrounding pieces of junk DNA as foremen.

This could explain why gene therapy has had limited success: scientists have tended to transfer genes without the junk DNA. And we know what happens when a foreman doesn’t turn up on a building site: you get the tea-drinking and wolf-whistling, but not much building.

CU researchers discover evidence of very recent human adaptation

So-Called 'Junk DNA' Is the Grammar of Genetic Language, Scientists Say

Why 'junk DNA' may be useful after all

 

[docj077]

Interesting, indeed. The "junk DNA" can have numerous uses including the presence of enhancers or silencers. This really isn't anything new, but the article brings up an important point when it discusses gene therapy. There really is no knowing what you're doing with gene therapy until you know precisely how a gene interacts with all other genes with regards to produced proteins and the elements that surround the gene itself.

 

[badasshairday III]

True Doctor, about the enhancing and silencing, but that has to do with how the DNA in the chromosome is organized in a eukaryotic cell right?

On the other hand, prokaryotes have little to no "junk" DNA but they regulate gene expression with inducers and repressors.

Maybe these scientists trying to transfer genes without the junk DNA are wrong in there approach because the physical arrangement of the DNA in eukaryotes is completely different than a prokaryote. It has been demostrated that genes from prokaryotes can be transferred with ease and controlled with inducer/repressor systems. If it is true that for eukaryotes the physical arrangement is important... then gene therapy must still have a loooooooong way to go.