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Factoring Out Common Genes To Find Unknown Ones
ProgressiveCynic writes "Dr. Michael Brent has designed a novel algorithm for discovering unknown genes by factoring out commonalities between the genomes of different species. Using the algorithm to compare the genomes of mice and men, he and his collegues have already discovered over a thousand new genes.
So why didn't he just use ZIP?"
So why didn't he just use ZIP?"
It sounds like what they are doing is identifying the shared patterns (rather than "factoring them out"); the idea being that, if a gene codes for something important it won't change much (important gene + random change = dead critter), while the junk regions will change at a steady rate. If you look at two creatures that are medium-distant relatives, the sequences they share are likely to be important genes.
This is exactly oposite the usual connotation of "factoring out," which implies that they are removing the common regions and looking for the differences.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. And, with regard to ZIP, they aren't looking for repetitions within a genome, but rather similar regions in corresponding portions of different genomes.
Although it appears valid how Dr. Brent is attempting to 'uncover' these novel genes, I'm not sure how much of a breakthrough this is. We have the sequences of both species and it was inevitable that an algorithm would eventually have been developed to hunt for them. There is nothing to be said about the biological relevance of his findings. Scientists will still have to conduct many experiments to determine if any of these novel genes are truly expressed let alone what the function of the gene products are, if any. Plus, I'm not sure what he means when he says that 7000 experiments will be reduced to 1500. I don't believe he has had much experience in a molecular biology lab. These findings will reduce the amount of effort biologists will exert to find the novel genes, but there is still a lot of work yet to be completed.