The Junk DNA Controversy: John Mattick Defends Design

The failure to recognize the implications of the non-coding DNA will go down I think as the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.

John Mattick
abc AustraliaJohn Mattick has just published a paper dealing with the controversy over the ENCODE results and junk DNA. As you might imagine, Mattick defends the idea that most of our genome is functional. He attempts to explain why most of the critics are wrong.

The title of the paper is "The extent of functionality in the human genome" (Mattick and Dinger, 2013). It's published in the HUGO Journal. Recall that HUGO (Human Genome Organization) gave Mattick a prestigious award for his contributions to genome research. (See The Dark Matter Rises for a discussion of these contributions.)

UPDATE: Mike White also discusses this paper at: Having your cake and eating it: more arguments over human genome function.

Mattick's paper begins by mentioning three of the papers that were critical of ENCODE results: Dan Graur's paper (Graur et al. 2013), Ford Doolittle's paper (Doolittle, 2013), and the paper by Niu and Jiang (2013).

He begins by addressing one of Dan Graur's points about conservation.

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