The mystery of the human genome’s dark matter

Ounzain says he likes to think of proteins as the hardware components of life, while the dark genome is the software, processing and responding to external information. As a result, the more we learn about the dark genome, the more we understand human complexity, and how we became who we are.

“If you think of us as a species, we’re master adapters to the environment at every level,” says Ounzain. “And that adaptation is the information processing. When you go back to the question of what makes us different to a fly or a worm, we’ve increasingly realised that the answers lie in the dark…