Brendan Maher Writes About the ENCODE/Junk DNA Publicity Fiasco

Brendan Maher is a Feature Editor for Nature. He wrote a lengthy article for Nature when the ENCODE data was published on Sept. 5, 2012 [ENCODE: The human encyclopaedia]. Here's part of what he said,

After an initial pilot phase, ENCODE scientists started applying their methods to the entire genome in 2007. Now that phase has come to a close, signalled by the publication of 30 papers, in Nature, Genome Research and Genome Biology. The consortium has assigned some sort of function to roughly 80% of the genome, including more than 70,000 ‘promoter’ regions — the sites, just upstream of genes, where proteins bind to control gene expression — and nearly 400,000 ‘enhancer’ regions that regulate expression of distant genes.

I expect encyclopedias to be much more accurate than this.

As most people know by now, there are many of us who challenge the implication that 80% of the genome has a function (i.e it's not junk).¹ We think the Consortium was not being very scientific by publicizing such a ridiculous claim.

The main point of Maher's article was that the ENCODE results reveal a huge network of regulatory elements controlling expression of the known genes. This is the same point made by the ENCODE researchers themselves. Here's how Brendan Maher expressed it.

The real fun starts when the various data sets are layered together. Experiments looking at histone modifications, for example, reveal patterns that correspond with the borders of the DNaseI-sensitive sites. Then researchers can add data showing exactly which transcription factors bind where, and when. The vast desert regions have now been populated with hundreds of thousands of features that contribute to gene regulation. And every cell type uses different combinations and permutations of these features to generate its unique biology. This richness helps to explain how relatively few protein-coding genes can provide the biological complexity necessary to grow and run a human being.

I think that much of this hype comes from a problem I've called The Deflated Ego Problem. It arises because many scientists were disappointed to discover that humans have about the same number of genes as many other species yet we are "obviously" much more complex than a mouse or a pine tree. There are many ways of solving this "problem." One of them is to postulate that humans have a much more sophisticated network of control elements in our genome. Of course, this ignores the fact that the genomes of mice and trees are not smaller than ours.

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