OK, so like most of the uneducated, I kind of thought that DNA explained it all ((kind of like the noun “Pommie”, the only noun that doesn’t need an adjective because “Pommie” says it all 😆 )) until I read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald today, Making something of junk earns geneticist top award.
Seems that 95% of the human genome makes letters that do not make proteins and that was therefore considered junk for many years (like why would 95% of anything in the human body be junk, er, except perhaps for my belly).
Professor John Mattick found that the non-protein-coding sections of DNA had a function, to produce RNA whcih many scientists now believe is the basis of the brain’s ability to learn ((OK, so it maybe junk in many folks then))
"The obvious and very exciting possibility was that there is another layer of information being expressed by the genome – that the non-coding RNAs form a massive and previously unrecognised regulatory network that controls human development.”
Neat – the new think I have learned today – now I can only hope there is a question about it at Quiz Night at the Boomarang Bistro & Bar Singapore tonight!
