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J. B.

Et tu, Pseudogenes? Another Type of "Junk" DNA Betrays Darwinian Predictions - Evolutio... - 0 views

www.evolutionnews.org/...ogenes_another_type046121.html

Junk DNA Intelligent Design

shared by J. B. on 29 Apr 11 - Cached
  • Genomes are littered with nonfunctional pseudogenes, faulty duplicates of functional genes that do nothing, while their functional cousins (the word doesn't even need scare quotes) get on with their business in a different part of the same genome.
    • J. B.
      J. B. on 29 Apr 11
       
      Does this mean Dawkins is arguing Atheism of the Gaps? (e.g., We don't know what these genes are for, therefore they must be junk. Therefore, there must not be a Creator.)
  • Once again, creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA.
  • recent results are challenging this moniker; indeed, some pseudogenes appear to harbor the potential to regulate their protein-coding cousins. Far from being silent relics, many pseudogenes are transcribed into RNA, some exhibiting a tissue-specific pattern of activation. Pseudogene transcripts can be processed into short interfering RNAs that regulate coding genes through the RNAi pathway. In another remarkable discovery, it has been shown that pseudogenes are capable of regulating tumor suppressors and oncogenes by acting as microRNA decoys.
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  • In some cases, what appears to be a nontranslated pseudogene can, in fact, code for truncated proteins (Kandouz et al. 2004; Zhang et al. 2006). Nevertheless, the evidence that some pseudogenes can exert regulatory effects on their protein-coding cousins is mounting.
  • For the large part, pseudogenes have been overlooked in the quest to understand the biology of health and disease, to the extent that pseudogene probes are often absent from commercially available microarrays. As evidence emerges that pseudogenes are deregulated in disease, and indeed that their deregulation can contribute to diseases such as diabetes and cancer, the prevalent attitude that they are nonfunctional relics is slowly changing.
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