It has suspected for many years that some diseases may be linked to non-coding or ‘junk’ DNA, but the mechanism behind the pathology hasn’t been worked out. Now, scientists in the UK think they have found a culprit implicated in cancer.
Junk DNA is a term used to describe the 97% of the genetic sequence in human cells found between the 3% coding for our 20,000 genes, once thought to be inert. Recently, studies have suggested large tracts of it have some form of biological function, including the regulation of genes themselves.
