To: Wilhelm Tell
It seems presumptous to call a sequence junk just because you
dont see its function.
A similar situation existed in natural product chemistry.
The term "secondary products" was applied to many compounds extracted
from plants that didn't seem to fit into any of the "primary" compounds
that were involved in the main metabolic pathways.
The chemists didn't presume the secondary compounds were junk...
they were just classified as something usually not critically
important to the plant, but not yet assigned a role.
Over the years we've found they play roles in plant defense,
allelopathy, and other functions unsuspected previously.
67 posted on
06/16/2007 2:19:10 PM PDT by
VOA
To: VOA
Interesting about the “secondary products” in plants. The chemists avoided the arrogant belief, “I don’t understand what it does, therefore it can not be important.”
104 posted on
06/17/2007 4:56:17 AM PDT by
Wilhelm Tell
(True or False? This is not a tag line.)
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