THE C-VALUE PARADOX

Posted on April 14, 2014

Genes contain all the information about an organism so we would expect that the more complex organism would have the more complex genomes -but this is different from what is observed & that is what gives rise to this paradox . Single celled Amoeba have genomes which are about 100 times larger than that of humans , in fact these are among the largest genomes observed in any organism . Further more organism which are quite similar to one another can have radically different genomes and this oddity is called C-value Paradox .

This feature is attributed to the fact that in many complex organism like humans and primates have a large amount of DNA which encodes for nothing since if all the genomic DNA in humans would have been used then the number of mutations per generation would be incredibly high .The human genome , for example, comprises less than 2% protein-coding regions, with the remainder being various types of  non-coding DNA . The huge amount of unused DNA which varies from creature to creature accounts for the C-value paradox .Now a days the phenomenon is better known as C-value enigma and the major question before scientific community is that the where does   the non-coding DNA come from and what is it’s function ?