Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
d-genes
dr-genes
drp-genes
DNA
RNA
Proteins
Fig. 11.8 The “overlapping triadic gene” (OTG) model of DNA
Table 11.4 The postulated
hierarchical genetic
architecture of DNA
New names
Traditional names
1. d-genes
Junk DNA, noncoding DNA, regulatory
regions, silencers, enhancers
2. dr-genes
Introns, RNA-coding regions
3. drp-genes
Structural genes, exons
molecules as a whole can be defined as a gene, to be denoted as the
d-gene.
It is now
known that about 30% of the human DNA molecule serves as the template for
RNA, leading to the concept of dr-gene, namely, the DNA segments encoding not
only DNA but also pre-mRNA. As is also well known, only less than 3% of the total
DNA mass of the human genome codes for proteins and such DNA segments can
be referred to as the drp-genes, since they code for not only proteins (p) but also
DNA (d) and RNA (r). So the genetic architecture of DNA can be schematically
depicted as shown in Fig.
11.8
.
According to Fig.
11.8
, exons are drp-genes and introns are dr- or d-genes.
The parts of the DNA molecule not included in the dr-gene category are denoted as
d-genes, which can be identified with the so-called noncoding DNA, including
promoters, silencers, and enhancers. It was suggested elsewhere that noncoding
DNA, i.e., d-genes, play a role in chromatin remodeling and hence in timing of
gene expressions, driven by conformons stored in DNA double helix (Ji 1991,
1999b, 2002b). So I am suggesting here a completely new way of classifying genes
in DNA structure as summarized in Table
11.4
.
The DNA of the cell is often referred to as the
topic of life
. This metaphor was
analyzed in detail elsewhere (Table 8 in Ji 2002a), which is reproduced as
Table
11.5
, with the last row (starting with drp-genes) added anew.
A topic contains more than just a set of words. In addition, it contains the
information
about the
order
in which the words are arranged in a linear series
from the opening to the last page. The literary information and skills that were
needed to select and order the words in a given pattern (i.e., a network topology
[Barabasi 2002]) in a topic came from the brain of the author who is physically
