#junk dna

New causes of autism found in ‘junk’ DNA

Light Body activation is the process of unlocking your subtle body’s light vehicle, allowing you access to higher realms of consciousness as well as enhanced spiritual power and health.

The process consists of 10 stages that each move you closer to fully unlocking your inner power.

With each step closer, changes occur in your mind, body, and soul.

These fundamental changes even include alterations to your DNA to accommodate the changing state of your being.

Light Body Activation Symptoms

For most people, this process is gradual, a natural consequence of spiritual growth and healing.

When it is spread out like this, there are few adverse side effects.

However, some people accelerate the process intentionally with various meditation techniques and energy flow.

They do this by increasing breathing exercises – and others still are accelerated along this process by trauma or revelation.

Those who experience it all at once are prone to the following Light Body activation symptoms:

Headaches and migraines.

Dizziness and nausea.

No energy, always feeling lethargic.

Digestive issues and stomach upset.

Changes in energy level.

Lessened sense of direction.

Impaired sense of time.

Mood swings.

Hay fever and allergies can appear or flare up.

Sense of smell altered, including scents you like versus fragrances you hate.

Aches and pains.

Muscle cramps and spasms.

Skin rashes, acne, and other topical problems appear for no reason.

Crystalline Body Symptoms

As you experience light body activation, your carbon-based body will shift into a crystalline form.

It does this via activation of the pineal gland, which in turn unlocks the junk DNA that all humans have.

This seemingly surplus DNA is very important for the forming of your crystalline body.

There are three significant symptoms:

Depression

The most common sign, unexplained bouts of depression appear that you cannot find a source.

As your carbon body disintegrates, you clear negative energy and past trauma – especially childhood trauma.

It’s not easy to deal with these things at the best of times, but with all of it happening at once and at such speed it can all get a bit too much sometimes.

Disillusionment

The old things that seemed to matter so much don’t have an impact anymore, past issues seem so insignificant to you as you undergo this shift.

You begin to question the truths you have held as granted your whole life.

Society seems broken, and nobody seems to be fixing it. Part of you is losing hope.

The old truths are being cleared out for the new realities.

The old way is done, and the new method is coming, but in the meantime, you feel as though you have nothing to believe.

Seclusion

Time to yourself is a very individual process, so you will have the urge to be alone a lot.

Accompanied by a sudden urge to be at one with nature, you may find it helpful to harness this need for seclusion by being out in the wilderness.

It will give you time to get to know your new self. Your transformation is almost complete, and the process of self-knowledge has just begun anew.

Though separated by a world of ocean, and unrelated to each other, two fish groups—one in the Arctic, the other in the Antarctic—share a surprising survival strategy: They both have evolved the ability to produce the same special brand of antifreeze protein in their tissues. A new study describes in molecular detail how the Arctic fishes built the gene for their antifreeze from tiny fragments of noncoding DNA, regions once considered "junk DNA."

The findings are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Years ago, we discovered how antifreeze glycoproteins evolved in Antarctic notothenioid fishes, and we knew that the Arctic cod evolved an identical version—but not in the same way," said University of Illinois animal biology professor Christina Cheng, who led the new study with graduate student Xuan Zhuang. "But exactly how the codfish independently did it has remained a lasting puzzle."

To solve that puzzle, Cheng and her colleagues scoured fish and other vertebrate genomes for a gene that might have been the ancestral precursor to the codfish antifreeze gene. They came up empty, so they decided to compare the genomes of codfish that did and did not produce antifreeze protein to see how the two lineages differed. The researchers found the ancestor of the antifreeze gene in a region of noncoding DNA, which, as its name implies, does not code for a viable protein.

"For many years after this discovery, I thought nobody was going to believe me, because the prevailing mindset at that time was that new genes have to evolve from pre-existing protein-coding gene ancestors," Cheng said.

Clues from Koalas

Alongside protein-coding genes, the human genome contains many non-coding sequences, so-called 'junk DNA', including an estimated 8% of our DNA derived from retroviruses. These viruses replicate by inserting their DNA into their hosts’ genomes; if inserted into the DNA of germ cells, giving rise to ovules and sperm, they can be passed on to future generations, eventually losing their viral function. Retroviral insertions in our genome are very ancient, but a more recent, ongoing invasion has been discovered in koalas (pictured), allowing us to study this process in action. Research shows that shuffling genetic material during DNA replication, between koala retrovirus (KoRV) and more ancient retroviral elements in the genome, can quickly disable KoRV. Known as recombination, this mechanism is likely to be a key early step towards retroviral integration. As researchers continue to monitor koala retroviruses, these beloved Australian icons may help us piece together our own genome’s history.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

Image by Emmanuelle Briolat

Research from the Department of Wildlife Diseases, Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, Germany; Australian Museum Research Institute; Department of Animal Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

Image copyright held by the photographer

Research published in PNAS, August 2018

A puzzle posed by segments of 'dark matter' in genomes—long, winding strands of DNA with no obvious functions—has teased scientists for more than a decade. Now, a team has finally solved the riddle.

The conundrum has centred on DNA sequences that do not encode proteins, and yet remain identical across a broad range of animals. By deleting some of these ‘ultraconserved elements’, researchers have found that these sequences guide brain development by fine-tuning the expression of protein-coding genes.

Hello everyone, I am back with another information post! This one is somewhat in response to a number of questions I’ve gotten that relate to “junk DNA”, and I wanted to clear up some misconceptions.

The concept of junk DNA is a fairly old one, and came from when scientists didn’t have a great understanding of how genes worked. When genetics got its start as a science, we looked primarily at bacterial genomes, because they are small, easy to get, and we can have lots and lots of identical organisms. And when we looked at bacterial genomes they looked something like this:

Lots of bacterial genomes are circular, like our friend A. arilaitensis here. And each of those colourful rectangles around the edge represent a coding region for a protein. Bacteria have extremely dense genomes with regards to the amount of protein coding regions and proteins that they produce, but they have to be. There just simply isn’t a lot of space inside the cell for them to have any extraneous DNA floating around. If a gene isn’t being used, then it is removed, which is in sharp contrast to higher organisms that can keep genes around just for the fun of it (and in case it becomes useful later, or if the environment changes).

So with bacterial genomes in mind, we can shift our attention over to some very different genomes. Let’s go back to my previous info post and look at the structure of a eukaryotic gene from there:

There’s quite a bit more here that wouldn’t be considered part of the “gene”, but are still important- the upstream and downstream enhancers/silencers, as well as the introns are not coding regions but are equally important to expression. However, when we first studying these genes, the people looking at it went “these are not coding, they produce no protein, what is the point?”, and they were labelled “junk DNA”. As well, a lot of these supposedly “non-coding” regions were found later to have other important functions related to DNA storage within the cell, as well as epigenetics.

To further this, not every non coding region has a function either. We do also have long stretches of basically nothing that still serves an important function in protecting us from harm.

The first and foremost of these are the telomeres, found on the ends of each chromosome. Because of how DNA replicates in our cells, a little bit is lost off of the end each time, just the space that it takes for protein to bind to begin replication. If it weren’t for these telomeres, we would very rapidly start losing coding regions of DNA, and interrupt some very important cellular processes.

The other areas that are more central in the chromosome mainly function as a buffer region in case of mutation (or we haven’t found the function yet!). There is a certain level of mutation expected with every replication (it varies from organism to organism, some are better at replication than others), as well as from environmental factors (UV rays, other types of radiation, stress on the organism, etc), so by having lots of areas where there are no genes being coded, it increases the chances that mutations will happen where it won’t make a difference to the function of the organism. Bacteria frequently pick up catastrophic mutations during binary fission, but because they replicate so quickly that organism will be quickly replaced (listen, the bacterial lifestyle is a harsh one). In more complex organisms, a lot more energy is invested into ensuring that DNA is replicated correctly, or at least in a way that doesn’t cause any harm. To lose these non-coding regions would be catastrophic, because it simply wouldn’t be possible for our DNA repair mechanisms to keep up with the number of mutations being thrown at them.

I think I’ve fairly effectively driven home this point now- there isn’t really anything that geneticists consider “junk DNA” (the term more commonly used now is “non-coding DNA”), and to lose these regions would have a negative impact on the organism that it affected. It’s unfortunately a myth that a lot of science education hasn’t quite caught up to correcting yet!

Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll be back in about a month with “How to Draw and Use Punnett Squares”!