ArticleBMC biology2017
On causal roles and selected effects: our genome is mostly junk.
Article in BMC biology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Genomic indicators of gene function: a systematic assessment of the human genome.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2026Article
- Pervasive Transcription in the Human Genome Exceeds Background Noise.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Revisiting Clonal Evolution Through the Light of Retrotransposons.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- Epigenetic silencing and genome dynamics determine the fate of giant virus endogenizations in Acanthamoeba.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Genetic Redundancy in Rye Shows in a Variety of Ways.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- What We Talk About When We Talk About "Junk DNA".Genome biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Does the Pachytene Checkpoint, a Feature of Meiosis, Filter Out Mistakes in Double-Strand DNA Break Repair and as a side-Effect Strongly Promote Adaptive Speciation?Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2022Article
- Linking genome size variation to population phenotypic variation within the rotifer, Brachionus asplanchnoidis.Communications biology · 2021Article
- The "Genomic Code": DNA Pervasively Moulds Chromatin Structures Leaving no Room for "Junk".Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Immune activation by a multigene family of lectins with variable tandem repeats in oriental river prawn (Open biology · 2020Article
- Genome size evolution: towards new model systems for old questions.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Genes and genomes and unnecessary complexity in precision medicine.NPJ genomic medicine · 2020Review
- Small Open Reading Frames: How Important Are They for Molecular Evolution?Frontiers in genetics · 2020Article
- DNA sequence-dependent chromatin architecture and nuclear hubs formation.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Adaptive Landscapes in the Age of Synthetic Biology.Molecular biology and evolution · 2019Review
- Functional evaluation of transposable elements as enhancers in mouse embryonic and trophoblast stem cells.eLife · 2019Article
- Defining microbiome function.Nature microbiology · 2018Review
- An Evaluation of Function of Multicopy Noncoding RNAs in Mammals Using ENCODE/FANTOM Data and Comparative Genomics.Molecular biology and evolution · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The idea that much of our genome is irrelevant to fitness-is not the product of positive natural selection at the organismal level-remains viable. Claims to the contrary, and specifically that the notion of "junk DNA" should be abandoned, are based on conflating meanings of the word "function". Recent estimates suggest that perhaps 90% of our DNA, though biochemically active, does not contribute to fitness in any sequence-dependent way, and possibly in no way at all. Comparisons to vertebrates with much larger and smaller genomes (the lungfish and the pufferfish) strongly align with such a conclusion, as they have done for the last half-century.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.