Can plants recover alleles lost on one of the homologous chromosomes?

[Art (Arthur Hunt)]

@stcordova

I could probably take a really small needle-like drill and drill out a small part of the tread of the tire, and the tire functions.

The problem with this analogy is that the experimental data shows that the small part (the promoter or enhancer) that you drilled out is actually functional without the rest of the tire (what you think is the 4D Nucleome).

@stcordova, you are digging a deeper and deeper hole to try and rescue a claim (that some mythical construct built on some ideas that you don’t understand and haven’t read about in any sort of detail proves that junk DNA has function) that is groundless. I believe you are clinging to an idea based on a complete misunderstanding of some review you read, and you seem to be grasping at even more absurd straws (these being your ideas about synteny and evolution). I think you need to take a deep breath here and review/revise your ideas.

[evograd (Blogging Graduate Student)]

@stcordova

A more legitimate approach for the advocates of the 90% junk view is to knockout simultaneously 90% of what they believe is junk and see if the organism actually lives.

Where did you get this idea that junk DNA = disposable DNA? You’d be very hard pressed to find any junk DNA advocate that believes that 90% of the human genome could be deleted (leaving a 300mb genome) without severe consequences.
Your hypothetical experiment is addressing a complete strawman of the junk DNA position.

[John_Harshman]

@stcordova

I said, NS resists evolution of synteny changes.

Why did you say it? In what way was it relevant to the topic?