Re: News: [some] 'Junk' DNA Proves To Be Highly Valuable (maybe)

In article <h1r56b$13gc$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Robert Karl Stonjek" <rstonjek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
'Junk' DNA Proves To Be Highly Valuable

ScienceDaily (June 12, 2009) - What was once thought of as DNA with zero
value in plants--dubbed "junk" DNA--may turn out to be key in helping
scientists improve the control of gene expression in transgenic crops.

That's according to Agricultural Research Service (ARS) plant pathologist
Bret Cooper at the agency's Soybean Genomics and Improvement Laboratory in
Beltsville, Md., and collaborators at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
Md.

For more than 30 years, scientists have been perplexed by the workings of
intergenic DNA, which is located between genes. Scientists have since found
that, among other functions, some intergenic DNA plays a physical role in
protecting and linking chromosomes. But after subtracting intergenic DNA,
there was still leftover or "junk" DNA which seemed to have no purpose.

Cooper and collaborators investigated "junk" DNA in the model plant
Arabidopsis thaliana, using a computer program to find short segments of DNA
that appeared as molecular patterns. When comparing these patterns to genes,
Cooper's team found that 50 percent of the genes had the exact same
sequences as the molecular patterns. This discovery showed a sequence
pattern link between "junk" and coding DNA. These linked patterns are called
pyknons, which Cooper and his team believe might be evidence of something
important that drives genome expansion in plants.

The researchers found that pyknons are also the same in sequence and size as
small segments of RNA that regulate gene expression through a method known
as gene silencing. This evidence suggests that these RNA segments are
converted back into DNA and are integrated into the intergenic space. Over
time, these sequences repeatedly accumulate. Prior to this discovery,
pyknons were only known to exist in the human genome. Thus, this discovery
in plants illustrates that the link between coding DNA and junk DNA crosses
higher orders of biology and suggests a universal genetic mechanism at play
that is not yet fully understood.

The data suggest that scientists might be able to use this information to
determine which genes are regulated by gene silencing, and that there may be
some application for the improvement of transgenic plants by using the
pyknon information.

This research was published online as an advance article on the Molecular
BioSystems website, and will be published later this year in a special issue
of Computational Systems Biology.

Journal reference:

1.. Feng et al. Coding DNA repeated throughout intergenic regions of the
Arabidopsis thaliana genome: evolutionary footprints of RNA silencing.
Molecular BioSystems, 2009; DOI: 10.1039/b903031j
Adapted from materials provided by USDA/Agricultural Research Service.
USDA/Agricultural Research Service (2009, June 12). 'Junk' DNA Proves To Be
Highly Valuable. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 13, 2009, from
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090606105203.htm

Not sure about junk DNA but certainly more junk scientific "journalism".
This piece is muddled to the pont of being incomprehensible.

DK


.

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