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For decades, many scientists have confidently dismissed the vast majority of the human DNA as useless evolutionary garbage. Yet a recently published scientific paper in Cell, one of the world’s most prestigious biology journals, declares a “paradigm shift” against the idea that huge portions of the human genome are merely “junk DNA.”After the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, a startling discovery was made. Only about 2 percent of the entire human genome codes for proteins. Scientists naturally asked, what is the other 98 percent doing?Evolutionary biology was ready with an answer. For decades, they had claimed that the...

In a study that could change the way scientists view the process of protein production in humans, University of Chicago researchers have found a single gene that encodes two separate proteins from the same sequence of messenger RNA. Published online July 3 in Cell, their finding elucidates a previously unknown mechanism in human gene expression and opens the door for new therapeutic strategies against a thus-far untreatable neurological disease. "This is the first example of a mechanism in a higher organism in which one gene creates two proteins from the same mRNA transcript, simultaneously," said Christopher Gomez, MD, PHD, professor...