Proceedings of the Australasian Association of Clinical Biochemists’ 49th Annual Scientific Conference

Abstract

It appears that the genetic programming of humans and other complex organisms has been misunderstood for the past 50 years, because of the assumption that most genetic information is transacted by proteins, leading to the derived assumption that most intronic and intergenic sequences, and the retrotransposed sequences within them, are non-functional debris. Surprisingly, however, the human genome contains only about 20,000 protein-coding genes, similar in number and with largely orthologous functions as those in nematodes that have only 1,000 cells. On the other hand, the extent of non-protein-coding DNA increases with increasing complexity, reaching 98.8% in humans. The majority of these se..