For decades, scientists have known that, despite its name, "junk DNA" in fact plays a critical role: While the coding genes provide blueprints for building proteins, which direct most of the body's functions, some of the noncoding sections of the genome, including regions previously dismissed as "junk," seem to turn up or down... read full story
"We've known for a while that short tandem repeats, or STRs, aren't junk because their presence or absence correlates with changes in gene expression,"