Junk DNA: goodbye! (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, January 23, 2014, 19:10 (3743 days ago) @ David Turell

More uses found for lincRNA, long intergenic non-coding RNA, by deletion studies in mice:-"Ever since the Human Genome Project decoded the genome, the prevailing scientific view has been that only the 2 percent that makes proteins—the building blocks of cells—was important. The rest was deemed not functional, or "junk." But from his days in graduate school, through his postdoctoral fellowship, and now as a Harvard Stem Cell scientist, John Rinn has been digging through the genome, challenging that prevailing belief.-"Now, Rinn and his Harvard Stem Cell Institute colleagues, including neurobiologist Paola Arlotta, have carried out an elegant and important experiment in which they have demonstrated that much of what had been dismissed in fact plays as vital a role as protein-coding genes.
 
"Rinn and his colleagues have generated 18 strains of mutant mice, removing from each a different piece of "junk" genome, or so-called long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs). If the lincRNA truly had been "junk," nothing should have happened.
 
What the researchers found was the opposite. Obvious defects were observed in seven of the 18 mutant strains. Three died shortly after birth, and there is reason to believe many others also are defective." -http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-01-lincrna-believed-useless-role-genome.html