Junk DNA may sculpted the face features of human beings ~ Technoactivity

Monday 28 October 2013

Junk DNA may sculpted the face features of human beings

By Unknown on 11:07

what is Junk DNA...?

Junk DNA is the components of an organism's DNA sequences that do not encode for protein sequences it is also called noncoding DNA.Did you think that the most beautiful faces are built using junk. In mice, the shapes of the face and skull are finely tuned by junk DNA, so called because it was initially thought to lack function since it doesn't encode proteins. The same junk DNA sequences are found in humans, so they are probably also shaping our faces.

This finding could help us make sense of some congenital conditions, such as cleft palates, that can develop even when the genes that shape the face appear to be working normally.

There is a huge degree of variation in human faces but, as family resemblances show, the overall shape is heavily constrained by genetics. However, so far, geneticists have identified only a small number of genes that influence the shape. These explain just a tiny fraction of the variation seen in human faces.

Axel Visel says (The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and his colleagues) - more variation is controlled by distant-acting enhancers. These are short sequences of DNA, in non-coding regions of the genome, that can influence the activity of the facial genes, even if they are a long way along the DNA strand.

"Enhancers are part of the 98 per cent of the human genome that is non-coding DNA – long thought of as 'junk DNA'," says Visel. "It's increasingly clear that important functions are embedded in this 'junk'."