A pretty deus ex machina approach.

How would the size of this plants genetic code be justified I wonder?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_japonica

There are plenty of plants that execute the exact same functions with code thousands of times smaller.

To say every codon has a purpose is to be ignorant of how evolution works. There are start triplicate pairs and stop triplicate pairs, the regions between stop and start don't need to have function, even structurally, otherwise why would chromosomes come in different lengths? There was no creator of the genome, there was no efficiency driven outcome, there's only descent with modification, things just happen to with the way they work, and that's beautiful in it's own way.

@TempermentalAnomaly @morphballganon
Junk dna was junk science from the start for ignoring that evolution often eliminates or reduces useless things, like eyes in cave fish, so there’s little likelihood that there’s useless parts of the genome.

Junk DNA is repeating codons, or codons that occur in areas that are outside of the "start/stop" codon triplicate pairs.

Those sequences do things and have effects. In fact, the coding regions are often less functional than the non-coding ones.

They aren't there for structural reasons, all DNA is the same 4 codons linked together over and over, all the different chromosomes are different sizes.

Sometimes they ARE there for structural reasons? Read: enhancers, or CTCF binding sites? Among many other myriad examples of functional noncoding regions? Also, nucleotides =/= codons. There are 64 codons.

All of this DNA is reported when the cells divide, that's the only time those regions between the stops and starts actually come into play. This is very easily proven, we know the structure of the reading proteins down to the molecule (indeed there are starts and stops and triplicate base pairs that design these transcribing proteins).

That's bull. You're out of your depth. A contemporary college molecular biology course would show your examples to the contrary.

The "important" junk DNA that has significance while not being in a "start->stop" zone are the codons that occur before the first start codon on either side of a DNA strand, when DNA is replicated the protein that starts replicating it has to start at 1 end of 1 side of the DNA in order to be able to read it

I feel like a broken record but Enhancers! lncRNAs! siRNAs! Binding sites! Other gene regulatory regions! Epigenetic nucleosome modifications! Chromatin remodeler sites!

except it needs to find the end first, and to make sure it's all the end it "clips" the first 6 (? Maybe more maybe less, it's been decades since I've studied this)

Oh, there's your problem. A lot has changed. You refuse to see the sea change happening around you because it means you're out of date.

Sorry for the wall of text, but there's plenty of examples of blatantly junk DNA, and there are known methods of how it occurs. Anyone who says every codon pair has a purpose has a screw loose and is ignorant to the mechanics of evolution.

I was happy to reply to you and engage pleasantly originally but you are only engaging with people that know less about biology than you do. You are not an expert if you last studied biology decades ago and can't remember the details. You certainly aren't enough of an authority on the subject to question a contemporary article published in Science or the work of other researchers currently in the field.

I really, really encourage you to read these papers thoroughly. You are the target audience-- people who learned the machine model of the cell and who are gripping it so tightly that they are blind to the nuance that we've uncovered. I also encourage you to not write insults about people who disagree with you, especially people with more domain knowledge than you have.