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Comment by forgottenpaswrd | Hacker News Reader

It looks like there is software in DNA, not just firmware. We are just starting to understand that gene expression is very important too, code that express(is executed) or not based on the environment, and that junk DNA is probably "not understood code" .

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DNA is a machine. It encodes information, but it also lives and breathes through interaction with various TFs, methylation events, packing, etc. There many types of epigenetic "state information".

We've known this for a looong time, it's just that it's so damned complex that we have trouble grappling with it.

And let's not forget the rest of the cell and all of the information encoded at the protein/messenger level.

I think it's more appropriate to say that the DNA is a storage medium. A pretty awesome storage medium: ~700 terabytes can be stored 1g of DNA.

The "machine" you are referring two, can be a set of enzyme complexes which performs the DNA transcription, as you said at the messenger RNA level.

Any source on that bit about junk DNA?

I just completed a reasonably advanced course on computational biology and I was still taught that although we have found noncoding DNA performing functions, the majority of our DNA is both noncoding and not used for anything (i.e. evolutionarily obsolete, transposons, etc).

Huh. I haven't heard that take on "junk DNA" in a long time.

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Noncodi...

You are correct. Most non-coding DNA is junk, which amounts to around 90% of the genome. Dead transposons alone make up just under half of the human genome.

You know, if we really wanted to be sure about that, we could just check the commit comments.

> junk DNA

Properly referred to as "noncoding DNA"... until it is proved to be coding something.

There is, in fact, a difference between "junk DNA" and "noncoding DNA," now that we see some noncoding DNA performing functions as switches, promoters, TF-binding sites (like the article describes), etc.

Junk dna is just header files and whitespace.

It's interesting to think of it like that but that's basing your understanding on something else that's just not as complex.

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