Media Clips - EMBL

Intricate Toiling Found In Nooks of DNA Once Believed to Stand Idle - washingt...
other papers appear in today's issue of Genome Research.
Greally noted that several recent studies have found that people are more likely to have Type
2 diabetes and other diseases if they have small mutations in non-gene parts of their DNA that
were thought to be medically irrelevant.
Another aspect of Encode had researchers looking at the equivalent 1 percent of the genomes
of more than 20 other mammals, and those results are forcing them to rethink the interplay
between genetics and evolution.
The expectation was that many of the most active DNA sequences in humans would be
prevalent in other mammals, too, because evolution tends to save and reuse what works best.
But more than half were not found in other creatures, which suggests they may not be that
important in people, either, said Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in
Cambridge, England, a coordinator of the Encode effort.
"I think of them as gate-crashers at a party," Birney said. "They appeared by chance over
evolutionary time . . . neither to the organism's benefit nor to its hindrance. That is quite an
interesting shift in perspective for many biologists."
Although the new view of the genome may at first complicate efforts to identify DNA stretches
of prime medical interest, Encode is sure to help in the long run, said Michael Snyder of Yale
University, another coordinator.
"Defining the functional elements helps us zoom in to look for differences in sequence that
might relate to disease," he said.
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© 2007 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR200706130...
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6/14/2007