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View Full Version : People Use Just 8.2% of Their DNA, Study Finds



skywizard
24th July 2014, 18:59
http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/068/518/original/dna-strand.jpeg?1406221573


More than a decade has passed since the completion of the Human Genome Project, the international collaboration to map all of the "letters" in our DNA. The huge effort led to revolutionary genomic discoveries, but more than 10 years later, it's still unclear what percentage of the human genome is actually doing something important. A new study suggests that only 8.2 percent of human DNA, or about 250 million of these so-called DNA letters, are functional, and more than 2 billion are not.

The results are higher than previous estimates of 3 to 5 percent, and significantly lower than the 80 percent reported in 2012 by the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Project (ENCODE), a public research project led by the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute to study the role of the 3 billion total letters in human DNA.

The differences may stem from the nuanced definition of "functional DNA," said the study's co-lead researcher Chris Ponting, a professorof genomics at the University of Oxford in England.

"[The ENCODE project] counted all pieces of DNA on which some protein activity occurred, whether or not that activity was useful to the cell," Ponting told Live Science. "The difficulty is that protein activity occurs on all DNA, such as when it is replicated just before cell division."

In the new study, Ponting and his colleagues report that majority of the human genome is nonfunctional, or "junk DNA." As studies have found, some of this junk DNA may be useful for regulating gene expression, but only a small portion of it, Ponting said.

Instead, upward of 90 percent of human DNA may be go unused.

"Whether people like it or not, the vast majority of our genome is junk," said Dan Graur, a professor of molecular evolutionary biology at the University of Houston in Texas, who was not involved with the new study. "We know that because we have so many organisms that have much smaller genomes than we do and organisms that have much larger genomes than we have. The size of your genome is not really what matters."

The wheat genome, for example, is five times larger than the human genome, according to a study published this month in the journal Science.

In the new study, the researchers used an evolutionary model to estimate what percentage of the human genome is functional and what percentage is junk. Mutations randomly occur in DNA. Genetic code with fewer mutations tends to be important because it shows these parts of the genome likely perform an important function, Ponting said.

The researchers compared the DNA sequences of 12 mammals, including cattle, ferrets, rabbits and pandas, to see how the animals' DNA had changed since their last common ancestor lived about 100 million years ago. Then, they counted the number of intact pieces of DNA preserved by natural selection.

"We decide on how much is functional by scrutinizing what has happened over long evolutionary time," Ponting said.

Animals that are closely related to humans have more similar DNA sequences than animals that are distantly related, the researchers found. For instance, mice and humans share 2.2 percent of their functional DNA because of the high number of mutations that occurred since they diverged more than 80 million years ago.

Like humans, just 8.2 percent of the DNA in each of these animals is functional, the findings suggest.

However, some of that DNA is more important than others. Slightly more than 1 percent of human DNA codes for proteins that carry out most of the body's biological functions, the researchers said. The remaining 7 percent may regulate these protein-coding genes by determining when to switch them on and off.

The findings may help guide researchers studying diseases and disorders, the researchers said. "If we're going to look where disease-causing mutations are, we only have to look in less than 10 percent of the genome," Ponting said.



Source: http://www.livescience.com/46986-human-genome-junk-dna.html



peace...

Wolf Khan
24th July 2014, 21:58
And people believe this crap????

Seikou-Kishi
25th July 2014, 03:35
And to a caveman who has never heard of electricity, my computer is junk. Just because they cannot say what the DNA is there for, or even whether or not it has a purpose at all, it doesn't mean that it has none.

In any case, a geneticist is not the best person to decipher DNA; a geneticist can describe the effect genes have on the body and they can analyse the constitution of DNA, but the best person to decode DNA is a mathematician or a computer programmer. The sequence of guanine, adenine, cytosine and thymine is what? It is a string of units or "bits" with one of four possible values. A string of units or bits with one of two possible values is called a binary string or word, DNA is like an incredibly long binary string, except it is not created in base 2 (binary), but in base 4 (quaternary)

For the sake of argument, let's replace each molecule with a quarternary digit. Until we know otherwise, we cannot do this except in an arbitrary fashion. We could number them based on any number of reasons, from molecular weight to average representation in the genome (which molecule is the most common? Etc.). So for the sake of argument we will have to be arbitrary. I will attribute to each molecule a quarternary digit according to the order I named them in the above list.

Guanine: 0
Adenine: 1
Cytosine: 2
Thymine: 3

(Notice there is no 4; decimal number systems have digits 0-9 (for ten digits), while binary has digits 0-1 (for two digits))

Take a section of a genome like this:

GTACCAGTCGACTCCAGTCTGGATCATAATCTTCGTTCGA

Use of letters as "symbols" for the molecules is a cipher. Once we've settled on our schema (i.e., the order of the molecules from 0 to 3), the current genome representation using the letters G, A, C and T is easily translated (or, rather, transliterated; we still have to determine significance)

We even know that DNA is coded in this way, because groups of three molecules1 together represent a sort of "coding syntax". Not to complicate things, but in RNA, the "nucleobase" thymine (T) is replaced or represented by the RNA nucleobase Uracil (U). To take an example of this coding syntax in an RNA sequence (RNA being a copy. It might be a good analogy to think of DNA and RNA as server-side and client-side programming, if we're sticking with DNA as a programming language, which I believe it is), the sequence UAG, which would be represented in our quarternary cipher as 310, means "stop" and instructs the cell to finish processing that section of the DNA. If your cell needed to replace a protein in its cell wall, it would find the DNA that coded for that protein and use the start and stop codons to find the ends of the section giving instructions for that protein.

Is UAG or 310 any different than an "End" line in a programming language?

This also raises a curious idea. In computer programming, it is possible to write things within a programme that aren't used by the programme itself. These are called comments. They can be used when looking for bugs in the programme and just as general reminders for the programmer. What if the "junk" DNA, or some of it at least, is actually this sort of data in our genome? What if some of the stuff that appears to create no protein, give no command or establish any sort of data-flow algorithm... What if those bits of unaccounted for DNA are comments left by those who created or modified our bodies?

Finally, other parts of the DNA could be the form of an archive of data of a personal or family nature. I wrote a short note in binary and converted it to quarternary:

1030122112231211130302001210000000000000

Say we found a gene sequence like this:

AGTGACCAACCTACAAATGTGCGGACAGGGGGGGGGGGGG

That would be the DNA form of my little message written in quaternary. Imagine this gene sequence was found in a person's genome as "junk" DNA, when really it was data left in the genome that reductionist science couldn't decipher because it went against their dogmas to consider the possibility. The message is "likes cake" lol. Maybe DNA of this sort builds into the human being personal traits that are passed down.

What if the human personality lies in that "junk"? I once read a study in which identical twins had their genomes tested throughout their lives. Where one twin might have had a more sedentary life and another might have had a more active life, this was shown in the DNA as active or inactive genes (which have different chances of being passed down) such that their genomes were not identical any longer. These differences were passed down to their respective children. There is also the case of the cure by hypnosis of the "incurable" genetic skin condition ichthyosis. The patient who was treated as a young child went on to have children and grandchildren, none of which had the condition. It had been edited out of the record.

The information on your computers is not physical. It is not physical in nature and it is not physical in origination. It is, however, stored in a physical way: the computer hard-drive. All those electrical ones and zeros, those little morse dashes and dots, they are all recorded on a physical device. For another analogy, think of it this way: the music your old gramophone used to make wasn't physical (it was an energetic waveform propagated through the physical medium of the air), but it was recorded in a physical way: the grooves on the record. The relationship between the music and the patterns of the grooves is the same relationship between the data your computer uses and the form it takes as recorded data on your hard-drive. It is the same relationship, I posit, that exists between a human's energetic signature and their DNA: DNA is a physical method for storing energetic data as an encoded, quarternary computer language.

We know belief, experience, mood and life itself can edit DNA. What if these things change your DNA because, as you change, you are editing the physical representation of yourself? As you change your energetic signature (for example, by focusing on loving thoughts) your DNA is updated to reflect these changes.

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1 groups of three... In binary programming, a "byte" is usually given as a sequence of 8 digits. 8 binary digits together can represent any one of 28 values. That's 256 possible values, ranging from 0 to 255 (notice how when selecting a colour in something like photoshop, you can choose a red, green and blue value each ranging from 0 to 255? This is why). If a sequence of three quaternary "bits" constitutes a byte in a quaternary genetic code, there are 43 possible values, or 64 possible values (0 to 63)

64 may seem to be a very arbitrary number, but it's not. It's the sixth power of two, the third (cube) power of four (as we have said) and the second (square) power of eight. 26=43=82=64. The relationship between these powers (2, 3 and 6 — for example, six is the first product of two prime numbers) is also interesting. It's the fifth dodecagonal number, combining the significance of the numbers 5 and 12, and the seventh centred triangular number, combining the significance of the numbers 7 and 3 (are you reading this, 777? Lol). It has seven factors, and is the first number to have that. A high number of factors makes division easy

It's also the number of hexagrams in the Chinese I Ching (because the Chinese I Ching hexagrams are based on the number 26, or two possibilities over 6 lines). Base 64 is also used in some programming applications

Highland1
25th July 2014, 08:44
Nice analogy Seikhu,
I always thought that DNA meant Dumbed, Not Active....:o)

Russ