Behavior of Junkies determined by JunkDNA?

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Rodent Social Behavior Encoded in Junk DNA

A discovery that may someday help to explain human social behavior and disorders such as autism has been made in a species of pudgy rodents by researchers funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).

The researchers traced social behavior traits, such as monogamy, to seeming glitches in DNA that determines when and where a gene turns on. The length of these repeating sequences — once dismissed as mere junk DNA — in the gene that codes for a key hormone receptor determined male-female relations and parenting behaviors in a species of voles. Drs. Larry Young and Elizabeth Hammock, Emory University, report on their findings in the mouse-like animals native to the American Midwest in the June 10, 2005 Science.

...“This research appears to have found one of those hotspots in the genome where small differences can have large functional impact,” explained Insel. “The Emory researchers found individual differences not in a protein-coding region, but in an area that determines a gene’s expression in the brain. This is an extraordinary example of research linking gene variation to brain receptors to behavior.”

...“It was considered junk DNA because it didn’t seem to have any function,” noted Hammock.

In addition to NIH, the research was also supported by the National Science Foundation.
NIMH and NCRR are part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Federal Government's primary agency for biomedical and behavioral research. NIH is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.