Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth

Re:Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth by jszymborski on Saturday June 08, 2024 @01:34PM (#40619070)

As you'll often hear from geneticists these days, one person's junk is another person's treasure.

There certainly was an attitude for a long period of time that our DNA was full of junk[0], but the field has since characterized much of what we once thought was junk (i.e. non-functional DNA) actually is just non-coding DNA[1] that serves one or more of a wide array of biological functions.

In many ways, you can't really blame scientists of the 70s for thinking that much of what we now know is ncDNA was inscrutable junk. In many ways, given the technology at the time, it was.

It's a super interesting area of study.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5065367

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA

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Re:Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth by rpozarickij on Saturday June 08, 2024 @02:57PM (#40619525)

> junk (i.e. non-functional DNA)

Perhaps people should use the term "non-functional DNA" instead of "junk DNA" more often. Calling something as "junk" has unnecessarily dismissive connotations.

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Re:Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth by darby_nine on Saturday June 08, 2024 @04:14PM (#40619944)

Even non-functional isn't nearly as good as "genetic data with unknown function or expression".

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Re:Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth by tim333 on Saturday June 08, 2024 @07:26PM (#40620838)

Non-coding DNA (ncDNA) seems good to me. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA)

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Re:Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth by tsimionescu on Sunday June 09, 2024 @08:31AM (#40623996)

That's a very different concept. There's a lot of non-coding DNA that has never been considered non-functional/junk.

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Re:Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth by pretendscholar on Saturday June 08, 2024 @03:46PM (#40619799)

They should call it non-translating-to-protein-but-probably-has-some-function DNA

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Re:Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth by dataflow on Saturday June 08, 2024 @09:55PM (#40621458)

Or UCO... unidentified coding object.

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Re:Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth by ijidak on Saturday June 08, 2024 @04:52PM (#40620111)

I don't know. The concept of junk DNA never made sense to me because, besides proteins, you need to know how to assemble everything and when.

The idea behind junk DNA was that the rest of it didn't code for proteins and therefore was junk.

But if I give you a list of parts for a Boeing 747 that's not enough information to build the jet.

I never understood how this was not obvious to scientists.

I still remember being taught the concept of junk DNA in high school, and didn't believe it then.

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Re:Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth by biophysboy on Sunday June 09, 2024 @08:20AM (#40623946)

Junk DNA can also affect spatial organization of the genome, thereby affecting its usage.

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Re:Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth by gdrift on Sunday June 09, 2024 @10:07AM (#40624521)

Still 90% junk.

https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2011/05/whats-in-your-genome.h...

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Re:Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth by jszymborski on Sunday June 09, 2024 @02:51PM (#40626599)

65% junk according to the link, which is over a decade old.

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