Raw material for new genes
Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - 07:00
in Biology & Nature
Every region of DNA codes for a gene. Well, not quite. Although an organism's genome contains some regions that are read and transcribed into RNA, many of those do not give rise to functional genes. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön have now studied the genome of the house mouse Mus musculus and its relatives and have found that new functional genes can evolve from such putatively useless DNA regions within a short time.