On Saturday, my former Center for Genome Sciences colleague Sean Eddy brought up the idea of a Random Genome Project: let’s create a random genome to serve as a null model of genome function. With this random genome, we can determine how much supposedly functional biochemical activity do we expect to see just by chance, and, among other things, we might use a random genome to explore how new functions evolve by “repurposing” (Eddy’s great term) non-functional DNA. In the comments to that post, you can read some discussion of how you might go about making a random genome.
An easier task would be to implement the random genome computationally, an idea I’ve been exploring recently, using a genome-wide binding model along the lines of the one by Wasson and Hartemink.
Why do this? Because we could explore two kinds of null models – the random genome described by Sean Eddy, and the naked genome. Continue reading “Random Genome, Naked Genome”