LINEs
sa smith | June 4, 2010Long interspersed repetitive elements (LINEs) make up a HUGE portion of the junk in your genome.
They dont have any mystical, magical, purposeful functions.
They arent ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for anything, and technically, they cause trouble when they happen to plop themselves upstream of a gene and are thus negatively selected against, but I digress...
LINEs are kinda relatives of retroviruses that got trapped in our genome. Our genome doesnt really have an efficient way of cutting them out, though our genomes do try to keep LINEs quiet via epigenetics, and usually LINEs are totally non-…