It is hard to be wrong when you stake out both sides of a two-sided question.
The "junk DNA" consists of the 95% of the genome after allowing for the exons, introns
It turns out that jennyp is right. The majority of intervening sequences are intronic.
It is hard to be wrong when you stake out both sides of a two-sided question.
The "junk DNA" consists of the 95% of the genome after allowing for the exons, introns
<ahem> Mea culpa. IIRC I was paraphrasing this post by RightWingNilla at 1107:
Typically when you refer to a gene you are talking about not just the protein coding regions, but also the elements upstream which regulate its expression. Also introns break-up the protein coding region and may themselves regulate transcription. The stop codon is not where it ends though either, you have regions further transcribed downstream which will contain information which regulates how stable the mRNA is and how efficiently it will be translated. None of this is new to anyone and it is generally not what we are talking about when we are talking about Junk DNA. There are vast stretches of DNA in the genome which are nowhere near a gene or ceratinly not close enough to have any effect on gene expression via the mechanisms we know of. Perhaps there are indirect effects....?
OK, when they say that the genome is 95% "junk" ("valuable scrap" to Nebullis), what exactly are they referring to when they count it all up?