junk DNA

noun

: a region of DNA that usually consists of a repeating DNA sequence, does not code for protein, and has no known function

Examples of junk DNA in a Sentence

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What made us? Aside from examining the explosion of junk DNA, the researchers also spent some time looking into the thin fins found in the African and South American species. —

John Timmer, Ars Technica, 14 Aug. 2024 Now, scientists have traced our tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code that is abundant in our genome but had been dismissed for decades as junk DNA, a sequence that seemingly serves no biological purpose. —

Mindy Weisberger, CNN, 23 Mar. 2024 He was taught to call it junk DNA. —

Quanta Magazine, 2 Nov. 2020 Questions and much debate remain around junk DNA. —

Daniel Bastardo Blanco, Discover Magazine, 13 Aug. 2019 Transposons are indeed junk DNA, says Ting Wang, a genomic scientist who studies transposons at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. —

Douglas Fox, Scientific American, 1 Feb. 2022 At the time, glial cells were considered the brain’s equivalent of junk DNA, and most neuroanatomists were not interested in them. —

Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, 12 Aug. 2021