Deploying doppelgängers to distract pesky hangers-on isn’t a tactic reserved for paparazzi-plagued Hollywood heartthrobs. Some genes use look-alikes as decoys to distract mobs of interfering molecules, a new study shows.
The decoys, known as pseudogenes, are defective copies of protein-encoding genes. Many pseudogenes can make RNA copies of the instructions contained within their DNA, but have flaws that prevent the next step in the process, making proteins.
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