The hunt for dark DNA

摘要

THE fat sand rat is a strange creature. It lives in burrows, eats around 80 per cent of its body mass in leaves each day and doesn't drink water. But the really odd thing about this gerbil is that some of its DNA appears to be missing. No doubt you have heard of dark matter, which is thought to make up over a quarter of the universe. We know it's there; we just haven't been able to detect it. Well, something similar is afoot in the genome. My colleagues and I have dubbed this elusive genetic matter "dark DNA". And our investigations into the sand rat are starting to reveal its nature.