From what I know genes don’t exist as distinct parts of the genome, genes are just a way that we humans grouped the DNA.
97% is not junk is is just not coding for pure proteines.
The machinery can jump in to “commented” genes.
We don’t know exactly how non protein coding dna works to the lowest level. Allot of it is probably useless but you probably can’t remove it without destroying stuff.
Compared to a software project the DNA code has the worst code quality you will ever see in a working system.
Almost everything is dependent on everything else.
Is is essentially a software project made by a toddler cutting and pasting assembler code during millions of years.
Calling it junk didn't make sense to me 10 years ago, and today it is plain false.
DNA before protein sequence is used for binding modifiers.
This means that every protein has a huge if() { before them, and many kinds of different stuff can bind there in order to either suppress production of this protein or increase it. This is how all this stuff work.
How would it work otherwise, I always wondered. Will all proteins in DNA be produced at the same rate, as naive models will imply? It turns out, they aren't, and this is regulated by areas in 'junk' DNA.
Complaining about junk in DNA is like complaining about dispatch in computer program. All kinds of ifs and whiles and fors. Everybody knows our programs are 97% dispatch and 3% business logic computations after all. Or worse.
> Almost everything is dependent on everything else. Is is essentially a software project made by a toddler cutting and pasting assembler code during millions of years.
I prefer to see it as code written by demoscene genius hackers - hyperoptimized, "almost everything is dependent on everything else" - the same opcode may have three different purposes in a program, plus being data to some other code.
Still, I feel we're missing some important part of the picture - our current descriptions make living systems seem much more fragile than they really are. Maybe there's a new model / structural abstraction waiting to be discovered, that would make DNA machinery seem less ad-hoc?
97% is not junk is is just not coding for pure proteines. The machinery can jump in to “commented” genes. We don’t know exactly how non protein coding dna works to the lowest level. Allot of it is probably useless but you probably can’t remove it without destroying stuff.
Compared to a software project the DNA code has the worst code quality you will ever see in a working system.
Almost everything is dependent on everything else. Is is essentially a software project made by a toddler cutting and pasting assembler code during millions of years.