(Source: MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology) MIT biologists reveal how cells control the direction in which the genome is read. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - MIT biologists have discovered a mechanism that allows cells to read their own DNA in the correct direction and prevents them from copying most of the so-called "junk DNA" that makes up long stretches of our genome. Only about 15 percent of the human genome consists of protein-coding genes, but in recent years scientists have found that a surprising amount of the junk, or intergenic DNA, does get copied into RNA - the molecule that carries DNA's messages to the rest of the cell. Scientists have been trying to figure out just what this RNA...
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