this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
110 points (80.6% liked)

science

14762 readers
193 users here now

A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.

rule #1: be kind

<--- rules currently under construction, see current pinned post.

2024-11-11

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Review of 2023 book: How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology Philip Ball. ISBN9781529095999

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 months ago

'Junk DNA' is any DNA whose purpose was unknown when the article / book was written. But to return to your question, not necessarily.

First, we are usually concerned with the (dis)advantages of mutations when they occur in coding regions, which are definitely not junk DNA.

Second, just because a sequence does not encode any useful information does not mean it is useless. For example, it could be holding a coding region away from another, so both can be transcribed at the same time. Or it could be structurally important in the way the chromosome is folded.