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July 28, 2006

Strange But True!

Q. If we don't have lots more genes than a mouse, about 30,000 for each, what do we have to make us “lords of the realm”? More junk DNA can't be it, can it?

A. It's not really how many genes but how they're regulated or expressed during development, says Hopi Hoekstra of the University of California-San Diego. In fact, we have scarcely more genes than worms and fleas and far fewer than salamanders. Secondly, “junk DNA” is something of a misnomer; there is clear evidence that these regions not coding for proteins are full of gene-regulatory elements. “In other words, some non-coding DNA regions have function, even if termed ‘junk,' and these control gene expression. Finally, there's simply no correlation between genome size and organismal complexity.”


 
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