DNA may be the building block of life, but the vast majority of it in nearly all species is apparently useless. The human genome, for example, is made up of 3 billion base pairs of nucleotides arranged in the well-known double helix, yet only 3 per cent of that works as functional genes. The other 97 per cent has been written off as junk. But remarkably, junk DNA may turn out to be as important as genes – if not more so.
What is junk DNA exactly? Simply, it’s any DNA that doesn’t contain a blueprint for making proteins. Active DNA,…
