Uc Science Today

This week on Science Today, we covered a lot of topics, including a new finding sheds light on the unknown parts of the genome. This has often been called ‘junk DNA’, but scientist Diane Dickel of the Berkeley Lab doesn’t like that term. Instead, she says these are non-coding parts of the genome. "Only about 3 percent of the genome consists of genes, the other, more than 95 percent of the genome, what we call non-coding, which just means that it does not encode genes. And it is clear these are important things in that non-coding sequence." It is mutations in these non-encoding sequences, called enhancers, that causes genetic diseases. And this is an important finding because doctors don’t know what triggers some of these diseases, including cardiomyopathy – that’s a genetic heart disease. And that’s because researchers were looking for clues in the wrong part of the genome. Meanwhile, at UC San Diego, researchers looking into the mental health of seniors made a startling discovery about young adults. Dili