RE: Ask a biologist
May 25, 2015 at 5:18 pm
(This post was last modified: May 25, 2015 at 5:29 pm by nihilistcat.)
(May 25, 2015 at 10:42 am)Alex K Wrote:(May 23, 2015 at 4:32 pm)francismjenkins Wrote: haha ... well, couldn't figure out how to delete a post (although it's easy to edit a post). Maybe I missed something (I am a newbe after all)
Yes, you missed to answer my glorious question, and now I has a sad...
Sorry about that ... so if I remember correctly, you wanted to know about ENCODE?
Well, ENCODE is simply a project that seeks to catalog and understand all non-coding DNA in our genome (the first genome project focused on coding DNA, or our exome e.g. the 20 - 25,000 genes that code for proteins, which only accounts for ~1.5% of our overall genome).
Non-coding DNA performs many critical functions, including regulation of gene expression (e.g. cis and trans regulatory elements), some noncoding DNA are transcribed into noncoding RNA (e.g. tRNA, regulatory RNA molecules, etc.), some introns have been found to play important roles in regulation, ncDNA has a vital role in epigenetic regulation, and so on.
If you have more questions or need more detail, please feel free to ask (I only ask that people try and ask specific rather than broad based questions, since there's just no feasible way to teach an entire bio course in the span of an online thread like this).
