03Apr 2020 by Post

The “Why” of the Fly “Y”: Reflections on “Junk” DNA

Alison Nguyen, axioms, Carmen Sapienza, chromosomes, DNA, Doris Bachtrog, Drosophila melanogaster, Emily Brown, euchromatin, Evolution, Francis Crick, fruit fly, genetics, heterochromatic proteins, heterochromatin, Junk DNA, Leslie Orgel, nucleus, organism, phenotype, repetitive sequences, Richard Dawkins, RNA, The Selfish Gene, transposable elements, W. Ford Doolittle, Y chromosome
In April 1980, almost exactly forty years ago, the journal Nature published a pair of highly influential articles on the topic of what has become known as “junk” or “selfish” DNA. Both reflected the key concept of The Selfish Gene, the highly influential 1976 book by Richard Dawkins, namely, that organisms are merely DNA’s way of making more DNA. The first was authored by W. Ford Doolittle and Carmen Sapienza and titled “Selfish genes, the phenotype paradigm and genome evolution.”1 The second was authored by Leslie Orgel and Francis Crick and titled “Selfish DNA: the ultimate parasite.”2 Together they posited an easy-to-grasp way to conceive of “excess” nucleotides along chromosomes — repetitive sequences in general and transposable elements in particular. In short, it was proposed that most such DNA elements…
Read More
27Mar 2020 by Post

More Hints of Order in the Genome

Abo1, Amir Bitran, ATP, biochemistry, Biozentrum, Caulobacter crescentus, central dogma, Chelsea R. Bulock, chromosomes, cohesin, cotranslational folding, Darwinian mechanism, DNA, E. coli, error catastrophe, genome, GGC, GGU, Intelligent Design, Junk DNA, Lego blocks, misfolding, mRNA, Nature Communications, Patricia Clark, PNAS, polymerase, polypeptides, Polδ, proofreader, proteins, RNA, South Korea, strand breaks, UNIST, University of Basel, University of Notre Dame, University of Seville, William Paley
Genomics has come a long way since the central dogma (the notion that DNA is the master controller that calls all the shots) and junk DNA (the expectation that much of the genome is non-functional). If scientists ditch those old dogmas and approach the genome expecting to find reasons for things, they often do. Synonymous Mutations To-may-to or to-mah-to? The British write flavour; the Americans write flavor, but generally each understands the other without too much difficulty. Genomes, too, have alternate ways of spelling things: GGU and GGC in messenger RNA both spell glycine. No big deal, thought geneticists; these “silent” mutations cause no change in the resulting protein. At the University of Notre Dame, however, biochemists are finding that the differences in spelling are not just background noise; they…
Read More
02Jan 2020 by Post

Care for Appetizers? Electric Proteins, Spidey Sense, and More

anatomy, appetizers, Arizona State University, Barry Scott, Biomimetics, centipedes, cilia, electricity, electron transport, gene repression, genes, genomes, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, Joubert syndrome, Junk DNA, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Massey University, materials science, metabolism, Michael Behe, miRNA, orb webs, photosynthesis, physiology, Siam News, sliders, spiders, Stuart Lindsey, swimming, Tohoku University, University of North Carolina, University of Otago, X-ray crystallography, Zheng-Yi Chen
Welcome to the second day of the New Year! Like tasty sliders, these short news stories should get the juices flowing for big developments in 2020. Electric Proteins Dr. Stuart Lindsey at Arizona State University is an expert in single-molecule dynamics in biomolecules. Older methods of observing protein structure, such as X-ray crystallography, only gave single snapshots of the highly dynamic world, he says, where proteins rapidly change conformations and interact in complex ways. Electron transport has been well known in the cases of photosynthesis and metabolism. But a few years ago, his team was astonished to find that a run-of-the-mill protein conducted electricity. The protein was acting like a wire! Further observations revealed that all proteins conduct electricity — even the ones that had “weren’t designed to do this”—…
Read More
18Nov 2019 by Post

BioEssays Editor: “‘Junk’ DNA… Full of Information!” Including Genome-Sized “Genomic Code”

adenine, Advanced Science News, Andrew Moore, BioEssays, Biological Information: New Perspectives, cytosine, DNA, ENCODE, Evolution, Francis Crick, function, genome, genomic code, Giorgio Bernardi, guanine, Intelligent Design, isochores, Junk DNA, Leslie Orgel, narrative gloss, overlapping codes, proteins, selective pressure, thymine, viral genomes
How many times have we heard it claimed that the vast majority of the human genome is “junk” and therefore could not have been designed? Even in the face of overwhelming evidence from the ENCODE project and numerous other studies showing that most of our genome has biochemical function, most evolutionists still maintain that our genomes are largely junk. But a few brave scientists, including some rare evolutionists, have been willing to buck that trend.  In a new article at Advanced Science News — “That ‘Junk’ DNA… Is Full of Information!” — Andrew Moore, the Editor-in-Chief of the respected biology journal BioEssays, comments on a new BioEssays paper. The paper finds that our DNA contains overlapping layered “’dual-function’ pieces of information,” including a “genomic code” that spans virtually the entire…
Read More