Biosentients - Science Biology… etc

Not so long ago, the difficult-to-sequence, highly repetitive, gene-poor DNA found in regions of chromosomes known as heterochromatin was called "junk." Like dark matter in the universe, the true nature of heterochromatin was unknown. Now members of the Drosophila Heterochromatin Genome Project (DHGP), headed by Gary Karpen of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, are approaching a complete assembly, mapping, and functional analysis of those portions (other than simple repeats) of the heterochromatic DNA of Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. The results confirm that heterochromatin is far from mere junk........