James edward hughes
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Essays
    • Science >
      • Science Essays
      • Underwater World >
        • Essays
      • The Lithopaedion's Lair
    • History >
      • History Essays
    • Travel >
      • Holidays and Trips
      • Fossil Hunting
    • Book Reviews
    • Music >
      • Music Essays
      • CD Reviews
      • Concert Reviews
  • About Me
  • Contact

No more "Junk DNA"

9/6/2012

0 Comments

 
Scientists have discovered that some of our non-coding DNA, previously dismissed as “Junk DNA,” may in fact be responsible for the difficulty in predicting and treating diseases such as Diabetes, Crohns, High Blood Pressure, Cancer and Depression.
Picture
In 1972, Susumu Ohno, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist at the City of Hope Medical Center, labelled the seemingly large percentage of non-coding DNA as “Junk DNA”[i]. This label may have hampered serious attempts to ascertain the true function of non-coding DNA for over 30 years, but all that changed with the inception of the ENCODE project in September 2003. The culmination of the ENCODE project’s output to date is the simultaneous publication of 30 scientific papers in the journals Nature, Genome Biology, and Genome Research, on 5th September 2012, postulating that at much more of our DNA is biologically active than previously thought.

The importance of the discovery is that the DNA once dismissed as “junk” may in fact hold the key to the behaviour of cells, organs and other tissues. Changes in the junk DNA can alter gene switches the key areas which affects disease growth. These gene switches are found throughout the “junk” DNA, and number in their millions. They have already been linked to over 100 diseases including schizophrenia, and there may even be one which controls height. Understanding how these switches work will allow researchers to better comprehend the risk factors for various diseases, and the possibilities for recovery.

The ENCODE project, which stands for The Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements, was in many the successor to the Human Genome Project. It has received $288 million dollars of funding from the U.S. National Institute of Health, and has a consortium of 443 scientists from more than 30 institutions worldwide. It has conducted over 1,600 experiments on 147 types of tissue, and put in over 300 years of computer time. Some of the results of these experiments overlap with the earlier GWAS (genome-wide association studies) which highlighted the relationship of changes in “junk” DNA to the risk of developing a disease in 2007.

ENCODE’s discovery is the latest milestone on the road to the full understanding of the human genome. Here is a list of the previous key discoveries from a Guardian article in 2007[ii]:

1859 Charles Darwin outlines evolution by natural selection of inherited changes 
1865 Gregor Mendel experiments with pea plants, finds genes, and develops theories of heredity 
1943 Erwin Schrödinger proposes the gene as the information carrier 
1944 A United States team decides that DNA must be acting as the unit of heredity 
1953 Francis Crick and James Watson decipher DNA structure 
1977 Fred Sanger, in Cambridge, develops a way of sequencing DNA 
1987 The US energy department proposes the human genome project 
1989 Cystic fibrosis gene indentified 
1995 Haemophilus influenzae becomes the first free-living organism to have its entire genome sequenced 
1999 At Cambridge, the first map of an entire human chromosome (22) 
2000 First draft of human genome announced June 26. Leprosy, meningitis and fruit fly genomes completed 
2003 Entire human genome is sequenced


References:

[i] So Much ‘Junk DNA' in our Genome. Dr. Susumu Ohno. EVOLUTION OF GENETIC SYSTEMS. H. H. Smith, Ed. Brookhaven Symposia in Biology, No. 23. Gordon and Breach, New York, 1972. pp 336-370. Click Here for E-version of article So Much ‘Junk DNA' in our Genome.
[ii] Human code fully cracked. Tim Radford. Guardian. 14 April 2003.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Abdominal Pregnancy
    Alpaca
    Arctic
    Artificial Black Hole
    Astronomy
    Atom
    Black Hole
    Bone-Marrow Transplant
    Carbon
    Chemistry
    Dark Matter
    DNA
    Electric Ash
    Ettore Majorana
    Fountain Effect
    Gerald Pollack
    Global Warming
    Graphene
    Greenland
    Helium
    Higgs Boson
    HIV
    Honeybee
    Ice-Cap
    Ice Volcano
    Jupiter
    Lake Baikal
    Leukaemia
    Lithopedion
    Majorana Fermion
    Mark Oliphant
    Medicine
    Milwaukee Protocol
    Neptune
    Oil Spill
    Periodic Table
    Persistent Vegetative State
    Plastic Battery
    Quasar
    Rabies
    Rollin Film
    Second Sound.
    Snow Line
    Sun
    Superfluid
    Terminte Queen
    Termite
    Titan
    Transit Of Venus
    Venus
    Water

    Archives

    November 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    December 2012
    September 2012
    July 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    June 2011
    March 2011
    December 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010

MOST VIEWED POSTS

QUEEN CATHERINE DE MEDICI
Picture
The "Maggot from Italy's Tomb?" The "Black Widow" of St Bartholomew? Or one of the finest examples of power politics and survival ever seen? Well, I would have to say yes to all of the above, and more! Catherine was one of the most complex characters in a time of massive internal strife in France, with enemies both within (Guise, D'Albret) and abroad (Philip II of Spain).

MARK OLIPHANT
Picture
Born in Kent Town, Adelaide, Australia, Mark Oliphant was a Physicist, who received the prestigious Hughes Medal (other recipients include Alexander Graham Bell, Enrico Fermi, Stephen Hawking, and Andre Geim). He was also a life-long vegetarian after seeing a pig slaughtered at a farm as a child.

HAYDN'S CELLO CONCERTO IN C MAJOR
Picture
The third movement of Haydn's Cello Concerto in C Major is one of my favourite pieces of music. It is a truly joyous piece, and one which I find uplifting. The first performance I heard was by 13-year-old Han-na Chang, who took my breath away with her skill, musicianship and dynamism.

ETTORE MAJORANA & THE MAJORANA FERMION
Picture
New research from Dutch scientists has revitalised the search for the elusive  Majorana Fermion. The Majorana Fermion was first predicted about 75 years  ago by Italian scientist Ettore Majorana, one of the Via Paspernera Boys - a group of scientists named after the street where their lab was located.

LIQUID CRYSTALLINE WATER
Picture
Water. Without it, we would not exist. Covering nearly 71% of the world’s surface, it is one of the key building blocks of life on Earth. We think we know all about it, how it works, and what it does. But Gerald Pollack, Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, is sure we don’t!

FRANCO FAGIOLI: COUNTERTENOR ASSOLUTO
Picture
Franco Fagioli is an Argentinian Countertenor "who seems to redefine the capabilities of the countertenor voice." He has won great acclaim for his performance in the role of Arbace in the recent all-male production of Vinci's Artaserse, and will soon be releasing an album celebrating the star castrato Caffarelli.

© James Edward Hughes 2013
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Essays
    • Science >
      • Science Essays
      • Underwater World >
        • Essays
      • The Lithopaedion's Lair
    • History >
      • History Essays
    • Travel >
      • Holidays and Trips
      • Fossil Hunting
    • Book Reviews
    • Music >
      • Music Essays
      • CD Reviews
      • Concert Reviews
  • About Me
  • Contact