If junk DNA is useful, why is it not shared more equally?
Monday, January 31, 2011 - 15:30
in Biology & Nature
Recently, it has become clear that "junk DNA" performs a wide range of tasks. But why do some organisms have so much of it and others so little? A particular puzzle is posed by introns, stretches of DNA that interrupt the sequence of genes. Researchers propose a mechanism to account for the range of intron numbers observed between different species.