According to the classical view, at best one would expect to find copies of complete genes hidden within the ENCODE regions under study. As with the rest of the genome, gene transcripts made up only a fraction of the sequences. Instead, it turned out that not one percent but between 74 and 93 percent of the DNA was copied into RNA. Four out of every five bases had been transcribed into at least one RNA molecule. In other words, an enormous amount of “junk” must have been transcribed.
