Tag: ENCODE

A brief history of rubbish

Contents of the human genome [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]

In 1972, the geneticist Susumu Ohno coined the term “junk DNA” to explain why the genomes of closely related organisms vary so much in size: The mammalian genome […] contains roughly […] 3.0 × 109 base pairs. This is at least 750 times the genome size of E. coli. If we take the simplistic assumption that …

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