The human genome, the hereditary material we pass on to our progeny, is a 3*109 letter string over a DNA alphabet of four. We understand 1.5% of this mass, mostly in the form of genes, DNA substrings that code for proteins, the molecules making up every living cell. The remainder 98.5% of our genome was often deemed as "junk".
Recent comparison to newly sequenced non-human genomes revealed the locations of a staggering 106 additional DNA subsequences that must be important to the human cell.
I will discuss several works attempting to decipher what we have come to believe is the control layer of the genome, including our discovery of ultraconserved elements, arguably the most perplexing regions in the human genome. We will also track down a phenomenon of turning genomic junk into gold, and briefly discuss the relationship between genome evolution and noisy communication channels.
The talk will assume no prior knowledge in Molecular Biology.