What is Digg?93 Comments
- wonderchemist, on 10/09/2008, -2/+26Anyone who's watched the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Chase, knows what these ultra conserved regions are for.
- inactive, on 10/10/2008, -0/+21 It's was basically instructions left by an advance ancient dead race that were the origin of Bipedal sentient species and when you put together the pieces it activated a message telling the different races how they seeded the different planets{Panspermia Theory } and how the different races came from the same source and it was an effort by the writers to (1) explain why so many different races in Star Trek looked so similar and (2) Quick social commentary on the futility of Prejudice and Divisiveness in society.Great Episode.
Now can you tell what a Vagina feels like? Lol - zeebo, on 10/10/2008, -1/+17They'll be shocked to discover when they decode it that it says this:
* Copyright (c) 1969, Regents of the University of California Berkeley
* All rights reserved.
*
* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
* modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: - scoottie, on 10/10/2008, -0/+16Where's Mohinder Suresh?
- inactive, on 10/09/2008, -0/+15I remember a documentary about this. There was a company that made genetic drugs and one day had a release of one of their biological warfare drugs into the general populous of this lab. The computer that ran the place shut everything down, locked all the doors and called in a special SWAT team. A few of the members of that team were infected and in the end only a couple of them made it out. Both survived, but one was infected and he was used to try to eliminate the others remaining that had become infected.
- wunksta, on 10/10/2008, -0/+15wait that was resident evil!
- RedAbyss, on 10/09/2008, -4/+17Midichlorian controlling genes.
- SpeedSteamBoat, on 10/10/2008, -0/+10"Now can you tell what a Vagina feels like?"
Okay, you know rusty nails? Imagine the exact OPPOSITE of that. There you go. - inhaler, on 10/10/2008, -1/+11Me? Related to a Klingon? I wretch at the thought...
- WillisDickfit, on 10/10/2008, -0/+10Can you fill us non-virgins in, please?
- TrevorBradley, on 10/10/2008, -2/+11Just having finished reading Richard Dawkins "The Selfish Gene" I find the OP's quote amusing:
"Scientists have discovered mystery snippets of mammal DNA that have survived eons of evolution and yet have no apparent purpose. "
A gene's purposes is to make as many copies of itself as possible. Sounds like these genes are fulfilling their purpose just fine. - inactive, on 10/10/2008, -0/+9When the infection reached critical stages, they dispatched their infected person to kill all remaining swat members, and when he encounters them, they open fire on him, before he guns them down, sparing only one persons life when he drops his weapons. A scientist and creator of the virus, refused extraction by them until he has located and rescued his daughter. As he hacks into city's network of closed circuit cameras, he determines she is hiding out in her school and contacts the female and her group. He informs them that their method of sanitizing the city is by nuking it, but he offers to arrange for an evacuation in exchange for rescuing the scientists daughter. After various encounters with zombie dogs and infected children who kill some of them, they succeed in finding the scientists daughter, leaving the remaining survivors to escape and head towards the extraction point. The female records her story with a video camera as they travel to the extraction point.
- Fordi, on 10/10/2008, -0/+8"That's because it isn't actually doing anything, but there's no mechanism to take it out."
Mutations would reduce the region's fidelity, and without affecting function adversely (one would assume from a supposedly non-coding region), the minor and random changes would get preserved.
The region probably codes for something we're not aware of, and I would guess it causes miscarriages or some other reproductive fault if not working perfectly. - publiclurker, on 10/10/2008, -0/+7I'd expect as much from a yIH ngaghwI
:-) - Shadow503, on 10/09/2008, -3/+9I've ran several evolution simulations before. Most of these don't use an exact genetic code per say, but they still have simple software that mutates over time to simulate genetics. I've found that more evolved beings tend to have tons of garbage code.
I theorize that this code serves to help prevent random mutations from damaging important code. If the DNA of a creature will undergo 3 random point mutations over its lifetime, a large amount of dummy code will decrease the chance that the point mutations will modify anything vital. Natural selection could care less if this dummy code is modified, and it serves to help beings that have evolved to the point where most mutations are bad ones. - eir574, on 10/10/2008, -0/+6But, if the region served absolutely no purpose, you wouldn't expect to see conservation. It's very difficult to say that a region region of DNA doesn't have a functional role in the cell since it's entirely possible we just have no idea what to look for.
- eir574, on 10/10/2008, -0/+6If it's a protein coding region, you're right that it could play a role that's difficult for us to detect due to the developmental stage in which it's involved and/or because it's transcribed only under certain environmental conditions. In addition, certainly we've learned that there are functional, non-coding RNAs transcribed from various loci (e.g miRNA). That's a new enough field that we have no idea what to look for in terms of unexpected functional roles (to a large degree, at least). There's mounting evidence that there are many more small, seemingly non-coding RNA transcripts in the cell than we'd realized before, but making sure that's a real result and then tracking down their functions is quite difficult.
- V0lk, on 10/10/2008, -1/+6Evolution you say?? But Sarah Palin (I love her) says that humans and dinosaurs walked the Earth at the same time! (she's such a maverick that really speaks to me, joe six-pack...you betcha!)
- RobotBuddha, on 10/10/2008, -0/+5I don't think I ever saw that one, but after hearing about it always wondered why it just faded into obscurity within the trek universe. It seems like something so significant would have created huge uproar given how xenophobic many of the species in that show are.
- Mnementh2230, on 10/10/2008, -0/+5good replies all - thanks!
- gordonj, on 10/10/2008, -0/+4It is very doubtful that these regions serve no purpose, as the default result of that is degradation of the region by mutations. It seems unlikely to me that these regions are protein coding either. Genes require certain architectural features, and I think it would be quite obvious that these regions were genes based on that, unless they represent a totally new class of genes that don't operate in the same manner as all other genes we know about. As you mention, there are other transcribed regions that don't code for protein. My guess would be that this is more likely. Non-coding RNAs usually have very specific functions which are totally reliant on their structures which require pairing of different regions of the RNA, and therefore are well conserved by these structural limitations. Certainly, new classes of RNA that play important roles in genetic control organisms are being discovered all the time, and this is what I would guess these regions are. Of course in biology there is also always the chance that it is something completely different to anything we have encountered before, however, I think it is safe to say that these regions are functional.
- eir574, on 10/10/2008, -0/+4"Genes require certain architectural features, and I think it would be quite obvious that these regions were genes based on that"
In general, yes, but it can be surprisingly hard to tell. The "one gene to one protein" model that I was taught in high school is, of course, long gone. There are labs that put a ton of effort into identifying alternative splice variants of known genes, and it can be surprisingly hard to find exons that perhaps aren't often transcribed.
If you want to get even weirder, a couple of labs think they've seen transcripts containing exons that are very distant on the chromosome -- so distant that they suggest that RNA polymerase did not simply make a single RNA species from which introns were spliced out.
Main message: Determining where the coding regions are in DNA is not a fully solved problem! - ASSASSYN360, on 10/09/2008, -1/+5You must use down loaded content to activate those dormant genes.
- RationalFacts, on 10/09/2008, -2/+6Damn Thetons !!!
- Fordi, on 10/10/2008, -0/+4Hmmmm.
RNA, given certain coding configurations, can act as an enzyme, correct? I wonder if there are variants of this concept (aside from RNA transcriptase and polymerase) that have management duties within the cell / nucleus. - TrevorBradley, on 10/10/2008, -0/+4A lot of junk DNA is viral, inserted as copies into our own DNA just to make copies of itself. It's serving its own purpose just fine.
- Fordi, on 10/10/2008, -1/+5There is terribly unlikely to be a god, then.
- aznpwnzor, on 10/10/2008, -0/+4that's a key point many ppl miss as a result of language expression, "Natural selection favors...." "Natural selection has made...."
tho it is easier to explain like this it is much more technical and correct to say "...through natural selection." this can prevent certain connotations that fog up the denotation of "natural selection." - Techx4, on 10/10/2008, -0/+3There is no god
- aznpwnzor, on 10/10/2008, -0/+3so that's where cloverfield got its inspiration
- socialexpert, on 10/10/2008, -0/+3Although some of the ultra conserved regions, which were first identified by Bejerano in 2004, are involved in the regulation of the expression of neighboring genes.
According to previous research, it has shown that mice missing each of four regions seem perfectly normal. - krinn, on 10/10/2008, -0/+3Here's the original paper:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18832441 - gn0stik, on 10/10/2008, -0/+3Uhhhhmmmm. Documentary?
- PrincessDejiko, on 10/10/2008, -0/+3Probably off being a whiny bitch.
- Paulish, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2Natural selection couldn't care less about anything.
Can't care at all really. - Disgod, on 10/10/2008, -1/+3I absolutely agree, I just don't think feeding into the delusions of creationists helps anything.
- Disgod, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2According to this paper(link below) it is possible that portions of junk DNA are used to help "pack" DNA. So, and this is my own thoughts on the subject, it maybe that those regions are unaltered because if they were altered it would severely impact the way that DNA is packaged within the cell.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?a ... - Nicoon, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eon
- gingerboy, on 10/10/2008, -2/+4I say they're an advanced form of spyware - reporting back to xenu with all our buying habbits, the reason for this will become clear in 2012 when Xenu opens up his mega wallmart crushing franchise of intergalacitic megastores!!!
Be warned! - RobotBuddha, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2I don't think you understand, scientists are baffled, baffled I say! It's time to seize upon the opportunity to point our fingers at researchers and laugh, as they investigate the unknown, about the fact that they don't know everything.
- djgreedo, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2That's a really good point. It's easy to forget the distinction between evolution and genes/organisms self replicating.
It also seems silly to think something weird is going on because we don't understand what these genes are for...there is still a LOT to learn about our DNA. - Mnementh2230, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2I suspect it's junk DNA. It survives for Eons? That's because it isn't actually doing anything, but there's no mechanism to take it out.
- gordonj, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2Edit:
@me
"I think comparisons between different species is one of the most informative ways of finding out what DNA is important to the organisms by taking into account what is conserved between them (Actually, I just read the paper and that is what they did)"
Damn, I just re-read that, and that's painstakingly obvious really (it's what the whole article was about)! Sorry, I lost my chain of thought with that. Basically I think I was leading to: "I hear all about problems that bug annotators." - gordonj, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2http://genome.cshlp.org/cgi/reprint/gr.080184.108v ...
- Disgod, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2While I agree with you, please don't say that. That is an opinion, there is nothing in science that can prove or disprove any sort of deity, and saying that whenever you see some new form of evidence which supports evolution just continues to reinforce in the minds of creationists that the theory of evolution is somehow an atheist theory designed to destroy religion instead of an agnostic theory with no opinion on the subject.
- thomsonr, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708789/#comment
- Fordi, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2Feh. That's bollocks. Everyone knows, if a university had written the genetic code, it'd have been MIT.
- jpreall, on 10/10/2008, -0/+2You clearly haven't taken a biology class in the last 15 years. Look up the definition of "intron," and you'll see that these aren't introns. Maybe you'll also read about what their function are.
- TrevorBradley, on 10/10/2008, -0/+1That's not to say that this DNA doesn't have any effect on the human body... It's just that genes aren't there for our benefit. We (or more specifically, our vehicle bodies) are there for *their* benefit. If they happen to make a body that runs faster or is less susceptible to poison, they have a better chance of surviving. But they don't have to. They could just be along for the ride.
Selfish Gene really is a very good read, though a bit heavy on the math and computer science (which was a pleasure and not what I expected!) - igyigyigy, on 10/12/2008, -0/+1Ah, I'm on the same side of the Atlantic as England, so I tend to use English English :)
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