Genome Gradient Wikimedia Commons

When scientists sequenced the human genome a decade ago, it was somewhat like looking at a blueprint in a foreign language — everything was marked in its proper location, but no one could tell what it all meant. Only about 1 percent of our genome codes for proteins that actually do anything, so the rest of our DNA has been like biology’s dark matter, acting in mysterious ways. Now, after years of monumental effort, scientists think they have some answers.

A five-year project called ENCODE, for “Encyclopedia of DNA Elements,” found that about 80 percent of the human genome is biologically active, influencing how nearby genes are expressed and in which types of cells. It’s not junk DNA, which was previously thought — instead, these non-coding regions of DNA could have major bearing on diseases and genetic mutations, researchers say.

The project will rewrite the textbooks, turning the architectural blueprint of the human genome into a control schematic and instruction manual that explains how genes turn on and off. These rules dictate anything from embryonic development to the process of aging.

MIT computer science professor Manolis Kellis is one of hundreds of scientists participating in the ENCODE project, and he explained that the project lays bare the nucleotide differences that make us individuals.

“What ENCODE allows you to do is provide an annotation of what each nucleotide of the genome does, so that when it’s mutated, we can make some predictions about the consequences of the mutation,” he tells MIT News.

ENCODE annotates all of the 3.2 billion combined A, C, G and T nucleotides that make up genes and their regulatory sections. It turned up some interesting fossil sections — DNA relics of our evolutionary history — and suggests some of these “pseudogenes” are not dormant after all, but still active as non-coding RNAs. More than 400 researchers conducted upwards of 1,600 experiments with 150 types of human tissue in the past five years to untangle all this activity. If ENCODE was presented in graphical form, the data it has generated so far would fill a poster 30 kilometers long and 16 meters high, according to the Associated Press.

The ENCODE project's findings appear in more than 30 scientific papers this week, in Nature, Science and other journals.

The most interesting aspect of the study appears to be the surprisingly powerful function of gene regulation. Variants in our DNA that can cause disease are not always affiliated with the genes themselves, which is interesting from a genetic therapy standpoint. Rather, they’re often associated with DNA chunks that regulate those genes. Sometimes the regulatory chunks are close to the ones being regulated, but sometimes they’re very far away — at least from a linear perspective.

There’s a wealth of information and insight to be learned from these results, which you can explore with this helpful interactive explorer by Nature. The human genome was just the beginning.

[AP, ScienceDaily]

9 Comments

The Sumerian Aliens\Gods who made us humans, actually made several versions of us, until they got it right. That DNA is complicated stuff or in other words, we are all pretty special too; that is, if we do not annihilate ourselves on planet Earth with our own arrogance.;)

itd be interesting to see what happens when the 3billion lines of code are recoded into binary...A-T is 1, C-G is 0 or vice versa. might be junk or a message from the great programmer in the sky.

beefymclovin: How would you decode 3.2 billion codons consisting of 3 base-4 numbers into binary in an intuitive way? And what would you use to decode the ones and zeroes into something meaningful?
Does the great programmer use Assembler or maybe ASCII (in that case, what language)?

I don't say it isn't there, hey everything is possible!
I'm just saying it's close to impossible to figure it out in any reasonably time.

chiedoziea: When will scientists finally agree that the universe and everything in it is the handiwork of a super programmer. Not blind force. The sooner, the better.

As usual the implications of this new observation go unnoticed by the Darwinist masquerading as scientists.

So our DNA isn't mostly crap leftovers from millions of years of evolution? Imagine that.

I always find it interesting what people just choose to believe or make a choice not to believe.

Sumerians developed important mathematical ideas. They also created a number system based on 60. We have them to thank for our 60-minute hour, 60 second minute and the 360- degree circle. They used geometry to measure fields and put up buildings.

They created the wheeled vehicles, cart, & wagon, potter wheel. They also made the first boats of different materials for various purposes.

They made buildings with formed bricks of mud for homes,& created ziggurat. They built cities with organized planned streets.

The Sumerian language is the earliest known written language; wrote down songs & stories.

They studied the stars and seasons.

There is actually a long list of accomplishments by the Sumerians.

They are considering the earliest known civilized humans.

And yet, when we read their stone tablets text and learn humans were made from the Gods in various versions to do labor for the gods, until the Gods settle on one type of human. People in general and scientist a like seem to toss up their hands and say 'hell no'.

I think evolution is true scientifically. I can also see on occasion spontaneous changes of life happen too. I also believe the Sumerians were very intelligent people and recorded down what they knew, so our DNA, yes was tweak with and we were created by the GODS\Aliens.

Lol, people just pick and choose what they wish to believe....

Take care. ;)

This would be interesting if we could accomplish this index of genomic functions. It would greatly improve medicine. Side effects: Gattaca, BioShock, Zombies.
As an afterthought: Hey bagpipes, you seem to think that the former idea was that every time we evolved, a new lego was added to the giant lego DNA tower. You're wrong. Nothing about this article has any effect on Darwinistic theories, though our future findings from this endeavor may.
Beefymclovin, you didn't take into account that quantum computer can exist in both positive and negative states at the same time.

PLEASE READ AND STOP LIVING IN IGNORANCE

LINK: http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/in-search-of-truth.html

IN SEARCH OF TRUTH ARTICLE

Almost everyone, including scientists, religionists and philosophers, are engaged in a noble search for truth. Yet, what is truth and how do we find it?

Scientists have made great strides with their speculations, postulations, hypothesis and analysis of the creation — the universe we live in. Yet we see that the latest theories always seem to have some imperfections and exceptions, wherein it doesn’t quite work or falls short. For example we have seen classical physics evolve to relativistic mechanics and wave mechanics, which in turn evolved to quantum mechanics, with each theory giving better approximations, ever closer to explaining the reality we live in.

Every theory explains much, yet is incomplete and the small failures force new quests for the truth and newer theories emerge, none providing a complete and perfect answer. Although quantum mechanics apparently provides the best explanation available on a microscopic level at this time, even Einstein had serious doubts with its methodology and probability predictions, stating, “I am sure that God does not play dice.”

Difficulties exist in every scientific theory. This can be demonstrated by looking at some of the more fundamental laws. For example, the simple equation showing the gravitational attraction F = Gmm’/r2 between two masses in conjunction with Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, when analyzed on the scale of the universe has a very large problem. There simply isn’t enough mass in the universe to account for the entirety of the gravitational attractions calculated and observed in the universe. Therefore scientists postulate that there is an elusive element known as ‘Dark Matter.’ This hidden dark matter is necessary to balance the equations of motion for the planets and stars. Yet scientists are baffled as to where this matter is or what it actually is. They can detect its effects by observing the bending of light from distant stars. In other words, they know that the presence of some matter is there but what that matter is eludes them.

Similarly, it was once thought that protons, electrons and neutrons were the building blocks of all atoms and were the smallest indivisible items from which all else was built. Yet recent experiments and new calculations and theories have revealed the existence of finer divisions into smaller entities – quarks, bosons, leptons, etc, which in turn are made of even finer strings, as per the String Theory. Physics is ever expanding as the reality it attempts to explain continues to shift. Yet that reality continues to remain out of the grasp of the latest scientific theories.

Einstein has proven in his famous theory of relativity that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light or even close to that. Of course, nowadays it is common to find science fiction-like exceptions to this rule. In fact it is quite often difficult to tell where fiction becomes fact or fact is really fiction. However, NASA spent years and billions of dollars researching Time Warp Drives – a concept made famous in the popular science fiction show Star Trek.

In Star Trek the so-called ‘Warp Drive’ was used to power the Star Ship Enterprise. The concept is similarly mentioned in the movie Contact, where a space vehicle travels thru wormholes (a tunnel through time-space) to reach a distant planet many light years away. In the more recent movie, Race to Witch Mountain, wormholes are also used as a means of travel. But of course, this is totally science fiction, or the fantasies of overly imaginative minds. Certainly, it is fantasy at best.

Perhaps such movies are science fiction, but the best science fiction is always based on real science and is merely extended by brilliant conceptualizations. Wormholes are predicted and understood by mainstream physics as viable constructs. They are not fictional – the physics of wormholes works in theory. Miguel Alcubierre Moya is a Mexican theoretical physicist who is best known for his paper, The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast Travel Within General Relativity, which introduced the theory of the ‘Time Warp’ as a realistic concept. A great number of scientists found his theories viable, although improbable to put into practice in any shape or form.

The theoretical physics of this concept was considered viable enough that NASA funded research on ‘Time Warp’ as a possibly worthwhile means of space travel and an entire department of NASA was funded by the US government and dedicated itself to researching this subject. After the better part of ten years of dedicated research, NASA threw in the towel on this project, although the lead NASA scientist, Marc Millis, founded his own institution, the Tau Zero Foundation, to continue the research privately. Marc Millis headed NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project from 1996 to 2002.

Recently, Marc Millis and Eric Davis of the Tau Zero Foundation released the book Frontiers of Propulsion Science, a compilation of emerging science relevant to interstellar propulsion technologies. It is published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) as part of their Progress in Aeronautics and Astronautics series.

Science of today is simply not advanced enough to solve the physical problems found. Yet the physics involved in the concept of time warp space travel is real and theoretically possible.

All scientific theories are not revealed by a systematic study of nature and many times totally bizarre conceptualizations and strange intuition have resulted in great scientific discoveries. For example, the benzene molecular structure was conceived by Friedrich August Kekulé, a German chemist, from a strange dream of a snake chasing its tail. He did not discard his thoughts from this dream but applied them to his research and thereby achieved a great breakthrough.

SEE LINK ABOVE FOR THE ENTIRE ARTICLE :)

Sat-Chit-Ananda,
WOW! You really have gotten off the bunny trail.



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