2009 National DNA Day Online Chatroom Transcript
This is just one question from an archive of the National DNA Day Moderated Chat held in April 2009. The NHGRI Director and many genomics experts from across NHGRI took questions from students, teachers and the general public on topics ranging from basic genomic research, to the genetic basis of disease, to ethical questions about genetic privacy.
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What is "junk DNA" and what's it's purpose? If it's useless, why it hasn't thrown out?
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Greg Feero, M.D., Ph.D.:
I work to help make emerging genetic technologies more accessible to health professionals.
"Junk DNA" is an old term that is now largely regarded to be naive. It was once used to refer to DNA that did not directly code for protein, and thus was thought to be junk (i.e., not needed). But we now have come to learn that non-coding DNA has many very important functional sequences. Thus, what was once called junk turns out to be critical for life!
With that said, there are parts of our genome that we still don't know if they are functional. Are they junk-- or are we still just naive? We don't know for sure, but we should probably be careful to label them as junk because we have been fooled once before about this! |
| Anthro-Therizino (7th grade student) |
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