{sigh} You're hopeless.
“{sigh} You’re hopeless.”
Please read what I’ve written to you.
Going back to last night and the idea that only coding is DNA’s function.
A key is DNA itself, in it’s very structure, its’ electro-chemical properties, has function.
Regions well outside any gene or coding region have shapes that are recognized by regulatory events, can be protein alone or RNA alone or complexes of protein-RNA.
How and where the chromatin is wound or unwound is central to regulating gene expression patterns.
This is ultimately more important than protein coding in that proper regulation of gene expression determines everything.
Indeed many cancerous transformations can be accounted for by an acquired defect in this sort of proper regulation. Transformed cells lose their function and become differently-differentiated, no longer carrying out their physiological role. Yet they continue to code for proteins and churn them out without regard for their functional utility so that the cancer simply grows and uses resources without producing physiological benefit.
All due to dysregulation of regulatory elements which are non-coding “non-functional” regions of DNA.
The structure or shape of DNA in and of itself is functional.