Out with the "junk DNA" phrase.

Sir, What started as a clever talk title by Susumu Ohno (1) to describe non-protein-coding DNA (ncDNA) quickly became a ubiquitous phrase (“junk DNA”) causing substantial confusion and distraction from a more sophisticated and accurate apprecia­ tion of the majority of the human genome that does not encode for proteins. While much of the scientific community rejected the vernacular—with some prominent scholars calling the charac­ terization “ambiguous and even derogatory” (2)—the term per­ sisted widely, in concept and informally, in academic literature and popular media. The scientific intricacies of the many human­ omes (i.e., the genome, exome, transcriptome, and proteome) are relatively poorly understood by those outside the relevant disci­ plines, though those within the relevant disciplines cannot deny the importance of better understanding the molecular and cellular roles of ncDNA. While popular media are picking up on the gen­ eral scientific sentiment that ncDNA has some importance (see, e.g., [3]), there is considerable confusion about (i) what the