Junk DNA: goodbye!: Gene control (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, March 01, 2015, 15:17 (4152 days ago) @ David Turell

A paper from 2005 demonstrating the enormous amount of genetic controls that surround genes that remove genes from the one gene one protein concept from the early years of research and predicting there was more to come. The moral is that it is the entire DNA, not just the genes that create a living multicellular organism.- http://embor.embopress.org/content/embor/6/9/808.full.pdf-"Today, however, it is harder and harder to maintain that genes determine even a unique protein sequence. The classical molecular concept of ‘one gene, one enzyme', embedded in Francis Crick's central dogma, began to unravel with the discovery of reverse transcriptase in the 1970s. Then came introns, exons, jumping genes, alternative reading frames, and the whole machinery of post-transcriptional and post-translational processing. Even before the Human Genome Project was complete, Evelyn Fox Keller from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA, USA) suggested that the term ‘gene' might have become a hindrance to understanding, both for biologists and lay readers, “misleading as often as it informs” (Keller, 2000). Since then, genes have become even more deeply embedded in complex cellular and genomic networks. DNA methylation, microRNAs and a multiplicity of regulatory DNA sequences all alter the context in which the basic genetic information is interpreted." -What bothers me today is the research that claims to identify one gene with one function, just like one gene one protein. Yes, one gene may well be related to one function, but it just isn't that simple, as this article predicts.