At hundreds of spots in our DNA, there are ancient swaths that have remained puzzlingly unchanged over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. No one knows exactly what to make of these regions of DNA, called ultraconserved elements — they don’t appear to serve essential functions, so why are they preserved?
“They are considered one of the most mysterious aspects of the genome,” Ting Wu, a Harvard Medical School geneticist, said at a talk at a genomics conference Wednesday in Cambridge.
But Wu has a provocative idea about these ultraconserved elements: Perhaps they are a natural defense system against harmful changes to our DNA. And perhaps there could be a way to harness this mechanism as a therapy, triggering it to cull cells that carry harmful genome rearrangements, before there is enough of a problem that a disease is even diagnosed.
Share this article
Read the full, original story: Ancient swaths of DNA are a genomic puzzle that could lead to new therapies
