One might think so, except the piece of genetic material that ballooned is not technically a gene. Schmid has long been fascinated by the so-called junk, which makes him a rarity among molecular biologists. And on closer inspection, the junk sequences look like they might tell much more about human evolution and biology than previously thought. It is, after all, a product of 3 billion years of evolution. It may be just a little bit flip for us to decide that there's nothing we can learn from things that evolution produced in 3 billion years of handiwork.
Proteins are the workhorses of the cells, the molecules that conduct the business of life.
The junk sequences don't instruct the body to make proteins, and they have no proven function. We know there's a lot of DNA that we don't know its function. The fact that we don't know its function doesn't mean it doesn't have a function. The human genome consists of 3.2 billion base pairs. The junk comes in several varieties, the most common of which are repetitive segments.