Tag Archives: junk dna

Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital have made a potentially exciting discovery by jumping into the abyss of the dark side of the genome. Once dismissed as “junk DNA,” roughly 75 percent of the human genome do not code for proteins. But these dark regions of the genome are far from junk — instead, they may hold tantalizing clues about ...

FINDINGS 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 ...

Long intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) are defined as RNA transcripts that are longer than 200 nucleotides. By definition, these RNAs must not have open reading frames that encode proteins. Many of these transcripts are encoded by RNA polymerase II, are spliced, and are poly-adenylated. This final fact indicates that there is a trove of information about lincRNAs in databases such ...

from Laboratory News – Dr Adele Murrell fills us in on a new approach to making sense of “junk” DNA and RNA “noise” to fight cancer.Our DNA is what makes us who we are and the central dogma underpinning genetics is that genes are encoded by DNA, the code is copied into RNA which is then decoded to build proteins. ...

from New Scientist Life by Linda Geddes From six-toed cats to miniature Spider-men, Junk DNA by Nessa Carey is a wide-ranging survey of a controversial, ever-changing field SNOW WHITE, the six-toed cat famously given to Ernest Hemingway by a ship’s captain, did not get its extra digit as the result of a freak gene mutation. In fact, extra fingers and ...

from Evolution News and Views It’s not exactly Fergusson, Mo., but the battle between ENCODE researchers and junk-DNA holdouts goes on. Our ongoing coverage of the hostilities left off with the latter sending over their latest salvo. Now, ENCODE is back. Confident that genomes are not mostly junk, they have set their latest contender in the ring: a mouse. The ...

PHILADELPHIA — Over the years researchers have made tremendous strides in the understanding and treatment of cancer by searching genomes for links between genetic alterations and disease. This image depicts an oncogenic lncRNA FAL1 (the dragon) dysregulating gene transcription and promoting tumorigenesis. FAL1 stabilizes BMI1 (the stone) by associating with it (the dragon twine around the stone), which subsequently enhances ...

By Julia Evangelou Strait Large sections of the genome that were once referred to as “junk” DNA have been linked to human heart failure, according to research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. So-called junk DNA was long thought to have no important role in heredity or disease because it doesn’t code for proteins. But emerging research ...

by Nikolaos Mellios, Mriganka Sur RNA acts as the intermediary between genes and proteins, but the function of pieces of RNA that do not code for protein has, historically, been less clear. Researchers have ignored these noncoding RNAs until recently for not complying with the central dogma of biology — that a straight line runs from gene to RNA (transcription) ...

“The brain likes this junk RNA” Dan Graur’s doubling down on evolution (either our genome is mostly junk or evolution is false) took yet another hit this month with a Harvard group showing that it is now lncRNA’s turn at the “I guess it isn’t junk after all” meme. The Harvard scientists selectively removed different so-called long intergenic noncoding RNA ...