Sandwalk

Lungfish are our closest living fish cousins. All living terrestrial vertebrates (e.g. amphibians, mammals, reptiles) descent from a common ...

Philip Ball believes that we are in the middle of a revolution in our way of thinking about how life works. His ideas are complex but part o...

Philip Ball is on a roll. He has published a new book plus several articles in popular magazines and he has appeared in a bunch of podcasts...

Zach Hancock is a postdoc in ecology & evoluvionary biology at the University of Michigan. He has a YouTube channel with several thousa...

Tom Cech won a Nobel Prize for discovering one example of a catalytic RNA. He recently published an article in the New York Times extolling...

The "All of Us Research Program" is an American effort to sequence one million genomes. The stated goal is to study human genetic ...

The phrase "dark matter of the genome" is used by scientists who are skeptical of junk DNA so they want to convey the impression t...

The Zoonomia project aligned the genome sequences of 240 mammalian species and determined that only 10.7% of the human genome is conserved. ...

The latest summary of the number of genes in the human genome gets the number of protein-coding genes correct but their estimate of the numb...

This chapter describes gene families in the human genome. I explain how new genes are born by gene duplication and how they die by deletion ...

Chapter 4: Why Don't Mutations Kill Us?

See Chapter 3: Repetitive DNA and Mobile Genetic Elements

If you are interested in learning more about junk DNA here's some links to relevant information. Prologue Chapter 1: Introducin...

The antarctic krill genome is the largest animal genome sequenced to date. Antarctic krill ( Euphausia superba ) is a species of smal...

The initial measurement of the difference between the human and chimp genomes was based on aligning 2.4 billion base pairs in the two ...

C. David Allis died on January 8, 2023. You can read about his history of awards and accomplishments in the Nature obituary with the provo...

There are several different ways to describe the human genome but the most common one focuses on the DNA content of the nucleus in eukaryote...

In order to have a productive discussion about junk DNA we needed to agree on how to define "function" and "junk." Disag...

New techniques are being developed to obtain the complete sequences of both copies (maternal and paternal) of a typical diploid individual. ...

The Wikipedia article on the Human genome contained a reference that I had not seen before. "Finally DNA that is deleterious to th...