'Junk' DNA proves functional(arch findings imply that these surveys m...)

"The findings by Dr. Bourque and his colleagues at the GIS are very exciting and represent what may be one of the major discoveries in the biology of evolution and gene regulation of the decade," said Raymond White, Ph.D., Rudi Schmid Distinguished Professor at the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and chair of the GIS Scientific Advisory Board.

"We have suspected for some time that one of the major ways species differ from one another for instance, why rats differ from monkeys is in the regulation of the expression of their genes: where are the genes expressed in the body, when during development, and how much do they respond to environmental stimuli," he added.

"What the researchers have demonstrated is that DNA segments carrying binding sites for regulatory proteins can, at times, be explosively distributed to new sites around the genome, possibly altering the activities of genes near where they locate. The means of distribution seem to be a class of genetic components called 'transposable elements' that are able to jump from one site to another at certain times in the history of the organism. The families of these transposable elements vary from species to species, as do the distributed DNA segments which bind the regulatory proteins."

Dr. White also added, "This hypothesis for formation of new species through episodic distributions of families of gene regulatory DNA sequences is a powerful one that will now guide a wealth of experiments to determine the functional relationships of these regulatory DNA sequences to the genes that are near their landing sites. I ant
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