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?"

Comments

"factoring out?"

[MarkusQ]

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.