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Intricate Toiling Found In Nooks of DNA Once Believed to Stand Idle - washingt...
Intricate Toiling Found In Nooks of DNA
Once Believed to Stand Idle
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 14, 2007; A01
The first concerted effort to understand all the inner workings of the
DNA molecule is overturning a host of long-held assumptions about
the nature of genes and their role in human health and evolution,
scientists reported yesterday.
The new perspective reveals DNA to be not just a string of biological
code but a dauntingly complex operating system that processes
many more kinds of information than previously appreciated.
The findings, from a project involving hundreds of scientists in 11
countries and detailed in 29 papers being published today, confirm
growing suspicions that the stretches of "junk DNA" flanking
hardworking genes are not junk at all. But the study goes further,
indicating for the first time that the vast majority of the 3 billion
"letters" of the human genetic code are busily toiling at an array of
previously invisible tasks.
The new work also overturns the conventional notion that genes are
discrete packets of information arranged like beads on a thread of
DNA. Instead, many genes overlap one another and share stretches
of molecular code. As with phone lines that carry many voices at
once, that arrangement has prompted the evolution of complex
switching, splicing and silencing mechanisms -- mostly located
between genes -- to sort out the interwoven messages.
The new picture of the inner workings of DNA probably will require
some rethinking in the search for genetic patterns that dispose
people to diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease, the
scientists said, but ultimately the findings are likely to speed the development of ways to
prevent and treat a variety of illnesses.
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One implication is that many, and perhaps most, genetic diseases come from errors in the
DNA between genes rather than within the genes, which have been the focus of molecular
medicine.
Complicating the picture, it turns out that genes and the DNA sequences that regulate their
activity are often far apart along the six-foot-long strands of DNA intricately packaged inside
each cell. How they communicate is still largely a mystery.
Altogether, the new project shows that the simple sequence of DNA letters revealed to great
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR200706130...
6/14/2007