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posted by martyb on Friday January 18 2019, @07:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-better-way-to-make-beer dept.

'Junk DNA' may help yeast survive stress

Like deleted scenes snipped out of a movie, some sequences in our genes end up on the cutting-room floor, and cells don't use them to make proteins. Now, two studies find that these segments, known as introns, help yeast survive during hard times. The research uncovers another possible function for a type of DNA that scientists once thought was useless.

"They are very strong, very convincing, and very exciting results," says evolutionary molecular biologist Scott Roy of San Francisco State University in California, who wasn't connected to the studies. The research "opens a whole new paradigm of what introns could be doing." It also answers the long-standing question of why yeast has kept what was formerly considered "junk DNA," says yeast microbiologist Guillaume Chanfreau of the University of California, Los Angeles.

[...] [Researchers] typically haven't looked at yeast under conditions it would face in the wild, where it could endure periods of food scarcity that don't occur in the lab. To determine what happens during deprivation, RNA biologist Sherif Abou Elela of the University of Sherbrooke in Canada and colleagues systematically deleted introns from yeast, producing hundreds of strains, each of which was missing all of the introns from one gene. The researchers then grew combinations of these modified strains alongside normal fungi.

When food was scarce, most of the intron-lacking strains rapidly died out [DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0859-7], the team reports today in Nature. They couldn't compete with normal yeast. However, in cultures with more nutrients, the altered yeast had the advantage. "If you are in good times, it's a burden" to have introns, Abou Elela says. "In bad times, it's beneficial."


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Friday January 18 2019, @06:42PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 18 2019, @06:42PM (#788355) Journal

    The first time I encountered the term "Junk DNA" it was accompanied by the statement (paraphrase)"This is what we're calling DNA that we don't know the purpose of. We don't know what this stuff does, but we're assuming that all parts of the DNA have some use, if we only knew what". Now evolutionarily speaking that's a flawed approach, but it shows how they were thinking about it. And some of it did turn out to be "junk" in at least one specific meaning: Stuff that used to do one particular job, but got broken and now doesn't work for that job." Some of our opsins had that source. Without that "junk" DNA we'd all be red-green color-blind. So "junk" is available for being re-purposed.

    The problem happened when the term got adopted by the popular press, who had a different idea of what "junk" was.

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