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Human Gene Count Slashed
jd continues: "This has the potential for making life extremely interesting for genetic engineers, given that both individual genes and interactions between genes must be proportionately more complex, in order to get the same level of complexity out. Half the number of genes equates to twice the information encoded in forms other than discrete physical blocks of code.
There is no mention in the article of a story running in 2002 of genetic therapies unexpectedly causing cancer, although if you now factor in the increased complexity of interactions, it is possible that such side-effects can be better understood and therefore prevented. The new estimates, therefore, are more than just idle curiosity but have the potential for impacting how the science is approached."
The new estimate, of between 20,000 to 25,000 genomes is marginally less than the 27,000 for the Arabidopsis, a flowering plant in the mustard family. Earlier estimates had placed the number of genomes at around 44,000 - or even as high as 100,000.
AFAIK, there's a lot more research going into the human genome than into the Arabidopsis one. So one would naturally presume that the number of human genes would be known better.
But if the estimate for the number of human genes is subject to so much variation, how can you be so sure of that for the Arabidopsis?
Is this a meaningful comparison?
(Not to mention that the entire premise seems to be flawed..)
Science requires objectivity and dismissing ideas because they are offensive to your tastes is a bias. While intelligent design may not be probable, there is still a minute possibility that it could have occured. This needs to be investigated like anything else. Since it is unlikely, the priority should not be high, but the results should not be dismissed based on your political or theological views (and the results shouldn't be amplified for the same either).
Let look at that stats:
Terrorist kill ~ 3000 people in 2001 and it becomes a focus of the US nation. While:
Breast cancer kills > 40,000 / year
Prostate cancer kills > 30,000 / year
Diabetes kills > 70,000 / year
The numbers world wide of course are much larger.
Yeah OT I know but these kind of discoveries convince me our priorities are misplaced.
On the contrary, the complexity now increases. There are many genes that act in completely differen't roles depending on the cell type (nerve, epidermal, etc.). So a common language changes from cell type to cell type-- if one would even call it a common language. There is a large part of Bioinformatics/Computational Biology that deals with trying to determine interaction networks between genes. It's very complex, and difficult to deal with.
:) ).
With less genes we then expect to have a larger amount of downstream interactions between other genes. It might seem that with less genes then we have less to worry about, but we have already speculated for a long time that gene regulatory networks are complex.
To use an analogy (for all you computer geeks), it's like a programmer trying to read poorly modularized code. When you have no idea what class is doing what, and how they interact with other classes (as every class has multiple roles and talks to multiple other classes) then it is difficult to understand why the program behaves the way it does. If the program had many classes that were well modularized and designed with very distinct roles, then it would be easier to understand why things work the way they do.
With less genes and increased complexity we have an even more difficult task. It also highlights some of the reasons on why microarray analysis has not done what we expected it to do. Increasing the complexity and dependency between genes means that we probably are going to take a longer time understanding and extrapolating information from all these networks (which means more job security for me