A research team led by Dr. John Stamatoyannopoulos, University of Washington associate professor of genome sciences and of medicine, made the discovery. The findings are reported in the Dec. 13 issue of Science. The work is part of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Project, also known as ENCODE. The National Human Genome Research Institute funded the multi-year, international effort. ENCODE aims to discover where and how the directions for biological functions are stored in the human genome.
Since the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, scientists have assumed that it was used exclusively to write information about proteins. UW scientists were stunned to discover that genomes use the genetic code to write two separate languages. One describes how proteins are made, and the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other, which is why the second language remained hidden for so long.
“For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made,” said Stamatoyannopoulos. “Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways.”
The genetic code uses a 64-letter alphabet called codons. The UW team discovered that some codons, which they called duons, can have two meanings, one related to protein sequence, and one related to gene control. These two meanings seem to have evolved in concert with each other. The gene control instructions appear to help stabilize certain beneficial features of proteins and how they are made.
The discovery of duons has major implications for how scientists and physicians interpret a patient’s genome and will open new doors to the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
“The fact that the genetic code can simultaneously write two kinds of information means that many DNA changes that appear to alter protein sequences may actually cause disease by disrupting gene control programs or even both mechanisms simultaneously,” said Stamatoyannopoulos.
Grants from the National Institutes of Health U54HG004592, U54HG007010, and UO1E51156 and National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases FDK095678A funded the research.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Scientists discover double meaning in genetic code
The idea of accidental emergence of complexity takes a serious hit with the discovery of a second language embedded in the DNA genome.
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6 comments:
Accidents happen, don't you know?!?
If the hardware substrate is DESIGNED to accommodate specific "instructions" (DESIGNED and written in layers of different languages), then it becomes more improbable (to the point of impossibility) that it all "just happened" accidentally.
I have always been struck dumb (in the speechless sense) of the argument for climbing Mount Improbability.
If I have the odds of 1 out of 10 for the possibilities, then that might be something I might be willing to gamble on. If the odds AGAINST increase to 1 out of 1,000,000, my chances of "winning" grow LESS, not more. If the chances go to 1 out of 10exp(10^120), then I don't really care what the potential "win" is; for all intents and purposes, it has become IMPOSSIBLE to win.
Yet the argument seems to be that by postulating there is 1 chance (out of astronomical odds), then it becomes CERTAIN (probability of 1) that the universe can and did produce that 1 chance.
I suppose that if the best you can do is speculate on IMprobabilities, then any chance (regardless of how astronomically remote) is better than no chance at all.
One of my sons once tried to convince me that he was going to become a millionaire within one year, doing the QuikStar (Amway by another online name) program. I pointed to the company literature regarding his chances of grossing a 6-figure income. (Note that the figure was GROSS, not net.) It was something like 0.0000000000000013 of all the people who enrolled would gross a 6-figure income. That didn't slow him down at all, because "he" was POSITIVE that
he" could beat those odds. (I also pointed out from the same company literature that the average monthly gross income was $118; that made no difference either.) Finally, I created an Excel spreadsheet, using the company's "6-4-2" formula (one person gets 6 others to sign up, they, in turn, get 4 people each to sign up, and that group, in turn, gets 2 people each to sign up). I first asked how many total people that would be (for just one level in the tree). I almost cried when he said it would be 13. I then set up a tree that was 10 levels deep, with just 6 people on each level for levels 1 through 8, then 4, then 2. I then summed all of the numbers; it was more than 744 MILLION. That didn't slow him down either, because "he" was POSITIVE that those numbers didn't apply to him.
At that point, I told my wife that I was done trying to explain the IMPOSSIBILITY to him, based on the ever increasing IMPROBABLE odds. He and his wife went on to waste a considerable amount of money and time before they finally realized that they were throwing their money away. That occurred several years ago, and not once has he ever acknowledged that he was WRONG.
It reminds me of the old shibboleth about a roomful of monkeys, banging away at random, eventually typing all the works of Shakespeare (if you just give "chance" a chance, and a long enough period of time). There is a very convincing refutation of that hypothesis in There is a God by Anthony Flew.
Yet as more and more data comes to light regarding the increasing improbabilities of design by chance, there is still a stubborn insistence that "chance" can do it all. And yet "chance" is nothing more than probabilities, which have NO inherent causual capabilities.
Hi Robert
I might have told the story before, similar to yours, about my nephew. When he was told that the probability of abiogenesis was 10^-200, he said, "...so it's possible, then, right?" The idea that, for comparison, there are 10^78 atoms in the universe does not slow down the need for abiogenesis to be true - for ideological purposes. My nephew is also an Atheist, which is very dependent upon fairytales.
The idea that DNA self-assembled with a full, correct code for the assembly and maintence of the first living thing, including imbueing it with the abstract of "life" is absurd on its face.
However, much of science these days is equally absurd. I just read "the Higgs Fake" by a physicist, Unsicker, who outlines the absurd basis upon which high energy particle "physics" depends. Every error in observation is defined as a new particle. No replication is done, so the new particle is accepted into the Standard Theory, which now has some 75 particles like that. Finding errors to call new particles is the path to Nobel Prizes.
I recommend reading it before reading other books on particle physics because it appears that he is right. I followed that book with Lisa Randall's new book, "Higgs Discovery", which is a very short explanation from the view point of a true believer.
Unsicker's criticism puts all her statements into a different light. Instead of considering them to be truth, I now have the tools of skepticism, and she makes obvious reference to two "necessary" absurdities which are indiscernable from miracles.
I have two more books to read on Higgs Mechanism before I critique it all from an outsider's engineering and logic viewpoint. It's big money, big stakes "science". Plenty of incentive to find stuff by exponential inferences.
Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
"The Higgs particle was confirmed by data from the LHC in 2013."
I certainly hope that none of this turns out to be based on faked data or mis-interoreted errors. If it is, it will make the doctored Global Climate Change data seem tiny by comparison. In the "publish or perish" environment, with huge sums of government grant money on the line, it is shameful that science has become corrupted to the point that published results cannot be trusted, especially from the big-name journals.
@Robert: Check out Fred Reed's latest for how unlikely abiogenesis really is.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/LastDarwin.shtml
Very interesting reading. His info comes in part from recent books by Michael Behe. I checked Amazon, and judging by the number of 'reviews' spewing insult, mockery and other invective at the man, his work is exposing the clothes-less Emperor Darwin quite effectively
Shit, so Dawkins was right back in the eighties. Nucleotides have more than one purpose.
They talk about: “the potential for some coding exons to accommodate transcriptional enhancers or splicing signals has long been recognized.”
So they realise that this is nothing new.
Science reporting!
Even if you granted the evolutionists the logical absurdity that all the information in the first cell created itself, it could do nothing of its own accord besides float around until wearing down into nothing. It would never be able to amass complexity of its own accord because it isn't sentinent. Even if you could begin with the most complex cell, it would likewise float around doing nothing.
The absurdity of the evolutionary *theory* is only compounded by time, because in order to go from zero to human life, it would, by their own measure, require billions of fractional evolutionary steps, systematicallt favoring only the beneficial mutations while dispensing with the rest. Each time something "evolves" into a definite life-form it would then have to evolve into another iteration over who-knows how many billion more times before arriving at all the life we see today.
How much time did the evolutionists arbitrarily decide it's been since the Earth existed, a few billion years? That would be NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH TIME for their model to work. Try trillions of years, nevermind that they'd have to repurpose all other data to correlate with their fabricated premise. Hey, I wouldn't put it past them. After all, we're already on, what, the seventh or so revision of time, something like 13 billion years.
This doesn't even take into account the MASSIVE complexity required to create sensory capacity (in order to actually, you know, sense, identify and interact with the environment), to say nothing about the organs necessary for sexual reproduction, both miraculously(!) coming into existence in stereo. Go figure.
No matter what system of information discussed, without the proper instructions to provide purpose and guide, which itself is part of a far more complex system, all of it is worthless. Now that there's been a new language discovered that was hidden in DNA, I already read in an article about this subject how evolution was responsible, clearly to defend their precious theory from newfound scrutiny. As more and more people realize the utter idiocy of evolution, look for them to become more pushy and hostile.
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