'Junk' DNA mystery solved: It's not needed

Enrique Ibarra-Laclette, Claudia Anah Prez-Torres and Paulina Lozano-Sotomayor

The humped bladderwort plant (shown here in a scanning electron micrograph) is a voracious carnivore, with its tiny bladders leveraging vacuum pressure to suck in bitty prey at great speed.

By Tia Ghose, LiveScience

One person's trash may be another person's treasure, but sometimes, trash is just trash.

So-called junk DNA, the vast majority of the genome that doesn't code for proteins, really isn't needed for a healthy organism, according to new research.

"At least for a plant, junk DNA really is just junk it's not required," said study co-author Victor Albert, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Buffalo in New York.

While the findings, published Sunday in the journal Nature, concern acarnivorous plant, they could have implications for the human genome as well. Genes make up only 2 percent of the human genome, and researchers have argued in recent years that the remaining 98 percent may play some hidden, useful role. [Image Gallery: Amazing Carnivorous Plants]

Trash or treasureFor decades, scientists have known that the vast majority of the genome is made up of DNA that doesn't seem to contain genes or turn genes on or off. The thinking went that most of this vast terrain of dark DNA consisted of genetic parasites that copy segments of DNA and paste themselves repeatedly in the genome, or that it consists of the fossils of once useful genes that have now been switched off. Researchers coined the termjunk DNAto refer to these areas.

"Nobody's really known what junk DNA does or doesn't do," Albert told LiveScience.

But in recent years, researchers have debated whether "junk" might be a misnomer and if this mysterious DNA might play some role. A massive project called ENCODE, which aimed to uncover the role of the 3.3 billion base pairs, orletters of DNA, in the human genome that don't code for proteins, found that in test tubes, about 80 percent of the genome seemed to have some biological activity, such as affecting whether genes turn on. Whether that translated to any useful or necessary function for humans, however, wasn't resolved.

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'Junk' DNA mystery solved: It's not needed