Thanks Edwino.
Well, junk DNA must have something going for it if the company, Genetic Technologies has taken out a worldwide patent on it.
Bah. That patent is basically crap. They claim they were the first to recognize that “junk DNA” was actually not junk. What they are talking about is regulatory regions. We always knew the regulatory regions were there, from the earliest days of molecular biology. In 1983, it was shown that enhancers controlling B immune cell differentitation were hundreds of thousands of bases away from the genes. Claiming credit for this is a bald-faced lie. Saying that all biologists dismissed non-coding regions as all “junk” is factually incorrect – we always knew genes were controlled from noncoding region enhancers, we always knew chromosome structure was maintained from noncoding structural areas.
Also, we still don’t know the exact regulatory sequences – that’s what I and so very many other scientists are trying in earnest to find out. We don’t have any easy way yet, and it is a very challenging and difficult problem requiring new innovations from hundreds of different groups. Claiming rights to all regulatory regions is like putting a patent on California and then claiming ownership of any gold someone finds there without doing any of the digging or panning.
Again, the vast majority of noncoding DNA doesn’t control gene expression, nor does it control chromosome integrity. It is useless repeat sequence that is freely evolving with no functional constraint.