Taming the genome's 'jumping' sequences
Friday, April 19, 2019 - 07:00
in Biology & Nature
The human genome is fascinating. Once predicted to contain about a hundred thousand protein-coding genes, it now seems that the number is closer to twenty thousand, and maybe less. And although our genome is made up of about three billion units—base pairs—many of them don't seem to belong to specific genes, and for that reason they were delegated to the dustbin of genetics: they were literally called "junk DNA".