"Listen to your junk man - he's singing ... All dressed up in satin, walking past the alley..." - Bruce Springsteen, New York Serenade Junk DNA is looking mighty fine lately. Only a few years ago, the non-coding regions of DNA that make up over 95% of the genome were looked upon as the uninteresting desert wastelands between the regions of DNA involved in protein synthesis. How times have changed! 'Junk' DNA not junk but key to complexity There's a very nice video on Gene Regulation (free) from Science Magazine that discusses the pivotal roles that these non-coding regions of DNA play in our genome. As John Mattick of The University of Queensland states at the end of the video: "We're just realizing that we've only got to first base and we have a long way to go, and most of the journey forward is going to be dissecting, analyzing and rebuilding an understanding of the massively parallel and extremely sophisticated RNA regulatory circuits, w...
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