Scientists find potential cancer origins in 'junk DNA'

Only 1% to 2% of the human genome is genes responsible for protein coding, and the rest of the non-coding regions were previously considered useless "junk DNA". However, researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries have recently found nearly a hundred potential triggers for breast cancer and prostate cancer in this "trash" area, demonstrating the importance of studying "junk DNA" to understand cancer.

Researchers from Yale University in the United States, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom, and other institutions reported in the journal Science on March 3 that as the cost of personal genome sequencing has plummeted, the number of people undergoing sequencing has rapidly increased. Interpreting mutations in their genomes, especially those in non-coding areas, has become a challenge currently faced by the medical community.

The researchers used genetic variation data obtained from the large-scale international scientific cooperation project "1000 Genomes Project" and combined it with information from another international cooperation project, the "Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE)," to develop a new method to screen for mutations in "junk DNA" that could potentially cause cancer, or what are known as the potential "triggers" for cancer.

Yao Fu, a doctoral student at Yale University who participated in the study, told Xinhua News Agency reporter that previous cancer research mainly focused on genes, but the latest study found that mutations in non-coding sequences can also lead to cancer. This changes people's understanding of cancer and has sparked enthusiasm among scientists for studying non-coding sequences.