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tut comments on [LINK] "Junk" DNA revealed as information processing system? - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: EphemeralNight 18 September 2012 05:07AM

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Comment author: tut 01 October 2012 04:40:50PM *  -1 points [-]

... on the order of 80% that's regulatory ...

No.

1 Less than 2% is coding

2 About 8% is known to be regulatory. Most of the interesting stuff from the ENCODE project is about what parts do what in what cells in this category

3 Given how they looked, it is likely that another 10% or so is regulatory in cells that they have not looked at.

4 20% or so has absolutely no effect

5 When they talk about 80% being "functional" that is in the weakest sense of the word functional that anyone has even played with. Typical examples of the functions of the remaining 60% of the genome is that something binds to it for no reason, or something binds to it to prevent it from being transcribed, or it gets transcribed but the RNA thus produced does nothing.