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surprise dna result – large deletion appears to have no effect!

“ To find out the function of some of these highly conserved non-protein-coding regions in mammals, Edward Rubin's team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California deleted two huge regions of junk DNA from mice containing nearly 1000 highly conserved sequences shared between human and mice.

“One of the chunks was 1.6 million DNA bases long, the other one was over 800,000 bases long. The researchers expected the mice to exhibit various problems as a result of the deletions.

“Yet the mice were virtually indistinguishable from normal mice in every characteristic they measured, including growth, metabolic functions, lifespan and overall development. "We were quite amazed," says Rubin, who presented the findings at a recent meeting of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.”

Note: this result has not yet been replicated.

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