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whereas d-genes are thought to carry timing information about when and for
how long target genes are to be expressed in the nucleus, which will lead to the
production of various dissipative structures inside the cell. The letter “d” in d-genes
can be viewed as “dual” in the sense that it can be interpreted either as “dissipative
structure-forming” or “DNA,” which may be viewed as being consistent with the
information-energy complementarity principle (Sect. 2.3.2 ).
An interesting difference between the spatiotemporal gene hypothesis (Ji 1991)
updated in Statement 11.4 and the regulatory RNA hypothesis of Mattick (2003,
2004) is that the former endows the non-RNA-coding regions of DNA with a full
gene status (i.e., as d-genes) storing the conformons with timing information about
gene expression, whereas the Mattick hypothesis endows the timing information
only to RNA-coding DNA segments and does not explicitly specify any biological
role for non-RNA-coding DNA regions which accounts for more than a half of the
total DNA mass in the human genome.
It is also possible that d-regions of DNA carry information required to control or
effectuate long-range correlations within DNA (and hence indirectly within RNA
and proteins as well), leading to the couplings between the very small (e.g., ions,
atoms) and the very large (e.g., cell behaviors including shape changes, and cell
migration), and the very fast (e.g., time constant in the range of 10 12 s characteris-
tic of covalent bond rearrangement events occurring locally on DNA) and the very
slow (e.g., time constants in the rage of years or decades, 10 8 ~10 9 s, associated
with DNA sequence evolution by genetic drift) (Ji 1991, pp. 52-56). Thus, it is
predicted that the d-genes will be found to play a critical role in effectuating long-
range spatiotemporal correlations both within DNA molecules and within cells
generally in order to transduce genetic information to various intracellular dissipa-
tive structures (IDSs), the final form of gene expression according to the Bhopalator
model of the cell (Fig. 2.11 ) .
Fink et al. (2007) recently analyzed the variations of the coding (C) and
noncoding (N) DNAs for 800 prokaryotic and eukaryotic species (see Fig. 11.9 ).
The double-logarithmic plot of N against C of these species produced a straight
line passing through mostly prokaryotic species (67) with a slope of 1.07 and a
set of lines that can be drawn through eukaryotic species (733) with an average
slope of 4.33 (individual slopes ranging from 2 to about 10). Fink et al. (2007)
proposed that eukaryotes require a certain minimum amount of noncoding
DNA which increases with the amount of coding DNA. This allowed them
to account for the slope of about 2 in Fig. 11.9 (see the slightly curved solid
line) but left unexplained the wide upward divergences of data points from this
lower bound.
Based on the spatiotemporal gene hypothesis, Statement 11.4, we can provide
alternative explanations for the distribution patterns of the data points shown in
Fig. 11.9 :
There exists a general power law relation between N and C:
¼ a C w
N
(11.5)
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