Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Biologists Reveal How Cells Control the Direction in Which the Genome is Read

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MIT biologists have discovered a mechanism that allows cells to read their own DNA in the correct direction and prevents them from copying most of the so-called "junk DNA" that makes up long stretches of our genome. Only about 15 percent of the human genome consists of protein-coding genes, but in recent years scientists have found that a surprising amount of the junk, or intergenic DNA, does get copied into RNA -- the molecule that carries DNA's messages to the rest of the cell.

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