In a Nature Science Update today, Helen Pearson reports on “ultraconserved elements” in vertebrate DNA, a collection of 480 DNA segments that do not code for genes (or only overlap slightly with gene coding areas) and yet have no variation at all between human, mouse and rat genomes. The study, by a team led by David Haussler of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seems likely to lead to a flurry of new activity as people try to figure out what is so important about these DNA segments that they could have survived hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

We’ve talked about Junk DNA before here on sciscoop, but this study stands out in making absolutely clear that this so-called “junk”
really is essential to our survival.