People Use Just 8.2% of Their DNA, Study Finds

[Skywizard]

More than a decade has passed since the completion of the Human Genome Project, the international collaboration to map all of the "letters" in our DNA. The huge effort led to revolutionary genomic discoveries, but more than 10 years later, it's still unclear what percentage of the human genome is actually doing something important.

A new study suggests that only 8.2 percent of human DNA, or about 250 million of these so-called DNA letters, are functional, and more than 2 billion are not.

The results are higher than previous estimates of 3 to 5 percent, and significantly lower than the 80 percent reported in 2012 by the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Project (ENCODE), a public research project led by the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute to study the role of the 3 billion total letters in human DNA.

The differences may stem from the nuanced definition of "functional DNA," said the study's co-lead researcher Chris Ponting, a professorof genomics at the University of Oxford in England.

"[The ENCODE project] counted all pieces of DNA on which some protein activity occurred, whether or not that activity was useful to the cell," Ponting told Live Science. "The difficulty is that protein activity occurs on all DNA, such as when it is replicated just before cell division."

In the new study, Ponting and his colleagues report that majority of the human genome is nonfunctional, or "junk DNA." As studies have found, some of this junk DNA may be useful for regulating gene expression, but only a small portion of it, Ponting said.

Instead, upward of 90 percent of human DNA may be go unused.

"Whether people like it or not, the vast majority of our genome is junk," said Dan Graur, a professor of molecular evolutionary biology at the University of Houston in Texas, who was not involved with the new study. "We know that because we have so many organisms that have much smaller genomes than we do and organisms that have much larger genomes than we have. The size of your genome is not really what matters."

The wheat genome, for example, is five times larger than the human genome, according to a study published this month in the journal Science.

In the new study, the researchers used an evolutionary model to estimate what percentage of the human genome is functional and what percentage is junk. Mutations randomly occur in DNA. Genetic code with fewer mutations tends to be important because it shows these parts of the genome likely perform an important function, Ponting said.

The researchers compared the DNA sequences of 12 mammals, including cattle, ferrets, rabbits and pandas, to see how the animals' DNA had changed since their last common ancestor lived about 100 million years ago. Then, they counted the number of intact pieces of DNA preserved by natural selection.

"We decide on how much is functional by scrutinizing what has happened over long evolutionary time," Ponting said.

Animals that are closely related to humans have more similar DNA sequences than animals that are distantly related, the researchers found. For instance, mice and humans share 2.2 percent of their functional DNA because of the high number of mutations that occurred since they diverged more than 80 million years ago.

Like humans, just 8.2 percent of the DNA in each of these animals is functional, the findings suggest.

However, some of that DNA is more important than others. Slightly more than 1 percent of human DNA codes for proteins that carry out most of the body's biological functions, the researchers said. The remaining 7 percent may regulate these protein-coding genes by determining when to switch them on and off.

The findings may help guide researchers studying diseases and disorders, the researchers said. "If we're going to look where disease-causing mutations are, we only have to look in less than 10 percent of the genome," Ponting said.



Source: http://www.livescience.com/46986-hum...-junk-dna.html



peace...

[Omni]

This being "modern" science I find some of their claims flaws IMO... Might I suggest DNA is used by our minds/thoughtforms? Did they never think of that? I really don't get why so many mainstream scientists insist it is "junk" dna just because they don't know what it does...

Interesting article still.. thx for posting it

[Tyy1907]

I agree. I just goes to show how little modern science understands DNA and its interrelation to our soul awareness.

[ghostrider]

Posted by Omniverse (here)
This being "modern" science I find some of their claims flaws IMO... Might I suggest DNA is used by our minds/thoughtforms? Did they never think of that? I really don't get why so many mainstream scientists insist it is "junk" dna just because they don't know what it does...

Interesting article still.. thx for posting it

Right on , scientist call it junk DNA only because they don't know what it's real function is or how it works , so they claim , oh that's junk moving on now over here you see this eight percent , ya know ??? ehummmm...

[Snoweagle]

Load of Bollocks, junk dna my arse lol

DNA is the physical representation of an aerial, a biological aerial. All life forms have dna, why, because it provides the uniqueness of everything that has life forces.

The problem is with science, constant focus on points; chemists look for a block of chemicals that have a name, if they can't find one they make one up. Then they prod it and poke it until it does something then they run around naked screaming "eureka". This is the failure in intellect within science. Peer reviewed pressure to "shut up" and "your career depends on it". This is why break throughs are few and far between within science. Only things that MSM report are the Corporate products which keep humanity distracted.

Our DNA is not fixed throughout our lives, it changes subtly or rather different bits are active during different periods of our lives. Even planetary location will impact us in a similar way.

Everything in the cosmos and beyond is electrical. Vortex or scalar energy. The DNA and RNA and others, they have yet to identify, are our connection to that energy.

[Marin]

In an earlier post of mine some years back on this forum I stated:

Is it possible that junk DNA is the platform where our internal thoughts, emotions and intentions connect with our physical body? Mission Control, if you will. I believe many have experienced this and have known this intuitively but not until recently do we have evidence of how this might work. I'll start with the scientific evidence (a work in progress, if you will) but it's my belief that much of this flows, by design, into the spiritual. With this new evidence, we might have a window into understanding the rest of the 97% of DNA and how the physical meets the mental, emotional and spiritual.

It's time to step into the quantum realm....

"To focus solely on DNA as a biochemical phenomenon, as mainstream genetics does, is to grasp only half the picture. DNA is not merely a physical molecule; it is also, and more importantly, the molecular form of universal creative consciousness, or “torsion” energy, as it self-transforms into what we perceive, belatedly, as the template for our physical bodies."
-Sol Luckman

"According to Iona Miller and Richard Miller, authors of an article published in Nexus based partly on Gariaev's findings entitled "From Helix to Hologram," "Life is fundamentally electromagnetic rather than chemical, the DNA blueprint functioning as a biohologram which serves as a guiding matrix for organising physical form." The far-reaching implication is that DNA can be activated through conscious linguistic expression (much like an antenna) to modify the human bioenergy fields, which in turn (like orbiting communication satellites) can transmit radio and light waves to modify the physical structure and functioning of the human body."

A few posts to consider:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post609592

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post612007