Vestigial DNA, otherwise known as ‘Junk’ DNA is a term scientists used to describe the DNA in the human genome that ‘serves no apparent function’, because secular biologists were under the assumption that it had lost function over the course of evolution.
However, in September 2012, the ENCODE project run by the US National Human Genome Research Institute, published the results for the second phase of their experiment which intends to find ‘all functional elements in the human genome’. Surprisingly the results showed that biochemical functions were able to be assigned to 80% of the genome.
ENCODE, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, is a project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute to identify all regions of transcription, transcription factor association, chromatin structure and histone modification in the human genome sequence. Thanks to the identification of these functional elements, 80% of the components of the human genome now have at least one biochemical function associated with them. This expansive resource of functional annotations is already providing new insights into the organization and regulation of our genes and genome.
Source: http://www.nature.com/encode/
Many scientists previously boasted Junk DNA (under the presupposition that it WAS Junk) as one of the leading evidences for the evolutionary process.
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