Gene Mappers May Have Missed Half The Genes

Nepre writes: "Forbes.com is running a story about new research that suggests that the Human Genome Project may have missed tens of thousands of genes in the race to map the human genome. This is interesting given the intense competition between commercial and academic research. As my grandmother used to say, "The faster you go, the behinder you get!""

Comments

I don't buy it - not yet, at least.

[Ieshan]

I'm rather concerned by some of the statements these guys made, before we put too much credibility in his findings.

"If the mouse and human genomes were so similar, we would be mice," says Shoemaker.

Well, Mr. Shoemaker, to be quite honest, we're not that far off, evolutionary speaking. We share the same classification as mammals, have hundreds of bodily functions that are nothing short of the same, share very complex behavioral patterns, and study the guys in an attempt to find out how our own brains work (go ask a research neurologist). If the man who says this is the director of anything, we need to push him off of his pedestal and teach him some biology.

"Before you count genes, you really need to define what a gene is," says Daniel Shoemaker.

Basically, it seems like the guy is "trolling". "Nuh uh, Taco!", he's saying. "The Theory of Graviity must be wrong because you mis-spelled gravity!" Really, he's saying that people are wrong, and then saying he's right, and then saying that the criteria he's used to make this sort of judgement doesn't exist in the first place.

No definition for a gene? "A unit of heredity. The unit of genetic function which carries the information for a single polypeptide."

Old news...

[Mercaptan]

For those in the biological sciences who do this kind of stuff, this is pretty old news. It was pretty obvious when they "announced" the completion that they had barely finished anything. Annotating the sequence information to include meaningful protein expression and gene regulation data will take many more years. It has come to light that the disparity between the Human Genome Project's version of the genome and Celera's version of the genome is pretty wide. This means that both sides missed something. Unfortunately, the political push to announce overpowered fact.

While by the present count, there seem to be too few genes, there are many other mechanisms to be explored, including alternative splicing, where the previously inviolable gene unit gets reorganized to generate different proteins, as well as ways to discover more genes. I have no doubt that the dynamics of genetic expression are far more complex than we know now.

DNA may be a linear string of data, but the interactions it makes with enzymes, cellular structures, and other molecules are massively parallel.

Genome curation is dynamic

[airuck]

My research team uses a high throughput mouse model system to identify mouse oncogenes and their human orthologues. We are fortunate enough to have access to both the public and Celera mouse/human genomes and have made detailed gene structure comparisons between hundreds of mouse and human genes and synteny comparisons between thousands of genes. Gene regulation and alternative splicing theories aside (both valid), there are certainly enough structural difference between mouse and human genes to obviate the need to invoke "missing genes". A better argument would be to focus on the known limitations of gene finding algorithms and the imperfections in EST and genome assemblies.

Are there missing genes in the public and private databases? Certainly. Until there is a full length clone, each gene call is a hypothesis. Ongoing curation will continue to sort out both false negatives and false positives.

CVBIG!