Ovarian cancer oncogene found in ‘junk DNA’
Most of those studies have focused on the portion of the human genome that encodes protein — a fraction that accounts for just 2 percent of human DNA overall. Yet the vast majority of genomic alterations associated with cancer lie outside protein-coding genes, in what traditionally has been derided as “junk DNA.” Researchers today know that “junk DNA” is anything but — much of it is transcribed into RNA, for instance — but finding meaning in those sequences remains a challenge. Now a team led by Lin Zhang, PhD, research associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has mined those sequences to identify a non-protein-coding RNA whose expression is linked to ovarian cancer. …