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Male mice grow ovaries instead of testes if they are missing a small region of DNA that doesn't contain any genes, finds a new paper published in Science.
The study, led by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, could help explain disorders of sex development in humans, at least half of which have an unknown genetic cause.
Mammals will develop ovaries and become females unless the early sex organs have enough of a protein called SOX9 at a key stage in their development. SOX9 causes these organs to become testes, which then direct the rest of the embryo to become male.
Sex reversal following deletion of a single distal enhancer of Sox9 (DOI: 10.1126/science.aas9408) (DX)
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Non-Coding DNA Changes the Genitals You're Born With
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 04 2018, @06:24AM
No, it doesn't. A gene is the encoding of a protein. That region does not contain the encoding of a protein.
In a file system analogy, maybe one could say the genes are the file contents, and the non-coding regions are the inodes. If the inode is missing, you no longer can read the file, even if the data is still on the disk.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.