One person's junk is another's treasure. An international team of scientists have found that strings of "junk" DNA that were written off as having no useful function are actually pretty important after all. Their work, published as a study in the journal Science Advances, focuses on transposable elements, a class of DNA sequences that can "jump," via a biological copy-and-paste mechanism, to different locations in a genome. Today, these "jumping genes" take up nearly 50 percent of human DNA; in other organisms, the proportion is even higher. What the researchers from Japan, China, Canada, and the US found is that a […]