A question about "Junk DNA"?

All that is true about "junk DNA" ... as much as 97% of DNA doesn't actually code for anything.

And Zipf's law is a real concept ... so if certain sequences were to be found to follow Zipf's law, that would indeed be interesting (although Zipf's law also seems to apply to random sequences to a lesser extent).

The sentence to be careful of is "it has been discovered that there may indeed be some sort of code locked in that mysterious 97%, something that we have yet to decipher."

That essentially says "it has been discovered that something may yet be discovered" ... which doesn't say much at all.

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Fair enough. This deserves a closer look. I don't know much about Graham Hancock, so I'll just go off the top of my head based on what you've posted and what I already know about "junk DNA" and Zipf's law.

What we call "junk DNA" is more correctly called "non-coding DNA". I.e. it may have some function w.r.t. spacing between genes, or in blocking some genes from being executed when in the presence of certain environmental cues, but the *sequence* in the DNA is not significant for this function ... the sequence is not coding for anything.

Perhaps what he is saying is that Zipf's law might be expected to apply to the coding parts of DNA (i.e. certain sequences are more common because they are *functionally* useful in a number of proteins). But Zipf's law would not be expected to apply to the non-coding DNA which is supposedly random. So if Zipf''s law does apply to the non-coding DNA, then this would suggest that the non-coding DNA actually is not random, but is actually coding for something, even if we don't know what it is. So it might be some sort of hidden message.

If that's what he's saying, then I would add one caveat. Non-coding DNA is not expected to be "random". It is the remnants of long discarded genes that once did code for something useful in some distant ancestor. So if there are certain sequences that show up more often in coding DNA, then we would still expect those sequences to occur more often in the non-coding DNA as well.

To give an analogy, Zipf's law tells us that in any passage of meaningful English text, the most common word ("the") would appear roughly twice as often as the second most common word, which appears twice as often as the third most common word, and so on.

But in any completely random jumble of letters this would not be true.

But say we took an old computer hard-drive that had been written over many times and is full of bits and pieces of old files that had once been useful ... the "junk DNA" of your computer hard-drive. Even though it is mostly gibberish, certain sequences (like the sequence "the") would still appear more often than other sequences.

So just take that with a grain of salt. It is sometimes easy to pull out amazing correlations between seemingly unconnected things, but a scientist still tries to find some *causal* connection that would explain this before looking for some sort of hidden cosmic message.

This is not a proof that such hidden cosmic messages don't exist. Only that we have to at least look for, and eliminate, other explanations first.

It's not called "junk DNA" anymore. There are functional bits scattered throughout it.

This is a rapidly expanding field. What's quite exciting, and scary, is that scientists has assumed that having the genome sequence would really be the last. major step towards understanding cell biology.

All that happened is things got very, very complex. We're still taught that protein A acts on protein B, which activates transcription of protein C. What's really happening is that it's as tangled as a bowl of cooked spaghetti, and some of the tangles don't even really make sense from a practical standpoint. It's the only way to make a human from not much more than 20,000 genes.

This relates back to DNA how, though? Well, again, we're taught the very simple dogma, transcription factor - > regulatory site -> transcription. It's much more complicated than that. Entire levels of regulation have been found. Not that long ago someone found out that there are noncoding RNAs, they don't produce protein. They only serve to regulate other RNA's by hybridizing to them, taking them out of service. This was a huge discovery. How many other interfering RNA type regulatory sequences hide in plain view? What about epigenetics? The Histone code? etc ect ect.

Other questions remain. The benefits of splicing RNA are obvious, but why are introns so huge? a gene on the genome can be 1kb of exon smeared across 100kb of intron. Why is that, when a simple little 10bp marker of an intron would be adequate to initiate splicing?

That's not to say it's all useful. A lot of it is just the same sequence, repeated over and over and over again, sometimes thousands of times (and curiously, the number of repeats varies randomly between individuals), pseudogenes (when a gene is duplicated and does not evolve a distinct function, there's no selective pressure to keep it from being mutated into essentially a bad photocopy of the gene) and a surprising number of old retrovirus genomes. This is "junk". In essence it's there because there's little selective pressure to remove it.

Of course, other questions remain too. Certain fish fit a vertebrate genome (roughly human complexity) onto 1/30 of the DNA we have. with little of the intervening "junk". If there are added functions, how do they adapt to losing most of that? Meanwhile, some plants have genomes 100x as big as ours. Plants are quite a bit simpler than vertebrates, they make extensive use of oscillating patterns and hormones which makes building a plant pretty simple. So why are plant genomes so large?

So, really, yeah. There's a lot there. We don't know what it does. I'm doing a PhD in cell biology myself. To tell the truth, we honestly don't have a friggin clue what it does. But some of what we have found in the decade since the genome was sequenced is pretty incredible, and almost surely much more awaits discovery. It's an exciting time to be a biologist.

I just had a look at the Supernatural entry at Amazon. The little blurb makes Hancock sound like this generation's Erich von Daniken

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4nike...

but more likely to sit around doing drugs.

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"Junk DNA" in eukaryotes encompasses a lot of stuff. Plenty is involved in "enhancer regions" which help regulate gene expression.

Some of those repeats give stability to DNA, helping to hold it together (G-C rich areas) or make it easier to pull apart (A-T rich areas).

You'll find pseudogenes -- old fossil genes that are no longer used.

Plenty of endogenous retroviral material.

Molecular parasites like transposons.

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Big long-lived eukaryotes don't have a good means of getting rid of noncoding DNA. So it sticks around for a long time, getting mutated into unrecognizability over lots of generations.

The video at the link is a clip from a larger work that follows five girls who have been infused with rare animal DNA. It's supernatural.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioowN9po_X0

Prof. Sam Chang with his students began searching for genes associated with various cancers, after finding out four proteins related to it from the junk DNA.This explains why diseases result in cell damage and their death, whereas cancers lead to cell reproduction and growth. Because only few fragments from the big code are expressed, they never lead to coherent growth. What we get with cancer, is expression of only few of genes alien to humans and symbiosis with some genes of bacterial parasites that lead to illogical, bizarre and apparently meaningless chunks of living cells. The chunks have its own veins, arteries, and its own immune system that vigorously resists all our anti-cancer drugs or treatments to viruses.

An analysis, from information theorist Claude E Shanon who in the 1950s quantified redundancies in languages. They found that junk DNA contains three to four times the redundancies of coding segments. Because of the statistical nature of the results, the researchers admit their findings are unlikely to help biologists identify functional aspects of junk DNA. Rather the work may indicate something about efficient information storage.

So these are a few things that are discovered, but I know that humans are extraordinary beings and our abilities to do extraordinary tasks when we put our minds to it are yet to be discovered. There is Deja vu, which many people firmly believe in. Some people have premonitions of the future, or intuitions that warn us against all sorts of dangers. There is still a controversy over the sixth sense and psychic abilities, which I believe we do possess. Only a compilation of past experiences make us believe in intuitions and the paranormal. The potential we have could lead to results in the science field and others, which could be as good as miracles, but they are yet to be explored. Maybe then, there will be proof for the sixth sense, deja vu, and other mysteries might be unravelled.

possibly her butt opens up right into a secret compartment and whilst she gets finished ingesting or something, she places her sandwich wrapper away and gets going. and according to risk she has have been given some superb wine in there to get somebody below the impact of alcohol? fergie is a mysterious (wo)guy. who pees on degree. she isn't a stress to debris with! sike. shes stupid.

100 years ago all DNA was "junk" DNA because we didn't know what it did.

We are learning more every day and someday we will know what it is for.