Zombie DNA Long Thought Dormant Can Rise to Cause Health Problems
Zombie DNA Some of that DNA is dead. And some could be undead. Perhaps the only thing scarier than the living dead is finding out that they're already inside the house. Geneticists recently found that non-coding genes -- some of the many dotting the human genome -- can rise from the dead. When they do they can cause problems, including one of the most common forms of muscular dystrophy. Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, or FSHD, is known to be genetic and inheritable in a rather straightforward way; it affects every person who inherits the gene. But its root cause was not understood until a paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, outlined how a piece of junk DNA ("non-coding DNA" is the politically correct term), thought to be disabled, can spring back to life, causing serious problems in some cases. Researchers pinpointed the region of the genome where the problem arises...