The Scientist Staff | Sep 1, 2007 | 5 min read
Junk in our genome? Re: "Junk worth keeping,"1 just because functions have been identified for some regions of genomes thought to be non-functional does not mean that all regions thought to be junk are functional. This is particularly true for bloated genomes (like the human genome) which are loaded with parasitic elements. A nearly neutral model for the evolution of eukaryotic genome structure, proposed by Michael Lynch2, suggests that mutational biases can overwhelm the cos