I'm not an expert on the subject. I can only repeat what Venter said: "the only junk DNA is in my colleagues brains". He claims that all DNA has function and that it should not be referred to as junk just because we don't know the function yet.

He talks about at intervals in this interview.

[–] morphballganon@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (8 children)

If there is a random mutation that is neither advantageous nor disadvantageous, wouldn't that be junk DNA?

Are we going to say we need to see how every descendant of the creature fares before we can decide whether it was junk DNA or not?

[–] TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't know too much about the subject, but maybe this almost 30 year old article can help. There's more specific examples in the article, but this quote captures the direction:

"I don't believe in junk DNA," said Dr. Walter Gilbert of Harvard University, a pre-eminent theoretician of the human genome. "I've long believed that the attitude that all information is contained in the coding regions is very shortsighted, reflecting a protein chemist's bias of looking at DNA." Coding regions may make the proteins that are dear to a chemist's heart; but true biologists, he added, know that much of the exquisite control over these proteins is held offstage, nested within the noncoding junk.

[–] NMBA@mstdn.ca -2 points 1 year ago

@TempermentalAnomaly @morphballganon
Junk dna was junk science from the start for ignoring that evolution often eliminates or reduces useless things, like eyes in cave fish, so there’s little likelihood that there’s useless parts of the genome.

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (6 replies)

load more comments (8 replies)