Re: GENOMES: Human gene number revised down

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Fri Jun 06 2003 - 08:35:59 MDT

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    On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Joao Magalhaes wrote:

    > Robert, can you repeat the reference to this revised number of human genes?

    The reference is to a recent meeting a Cold Spring Harbor.
    The actual article (from the NY Times) is pointed to here:
    Joao Magalhaes <jpnitya@sapo.pt>
    http://forum.javien.com/XMLmessage.php?id=id::OiwMFgsm-OEYl-XX5b-fmNG-KjRwKT4uJxYU

    (or you can backtrack through the forum messages under the
    topic cited to get to it I think)

    > Also, do you know if human coding regions are bigger than that of other
    > species? For instance, we may have twice as many genes than bread mold but
    > our genes may be twice as big and therefore have twice as many functions.
    > Just wondering.

    I do not believe that human coding regions are "on average"
    significantly larger than other species.

    There are a few genes, dystrophin is one that comes to mind,
    involved in physical structures that one may not require in
    simple organisms, that are I believe very large.

    Most of the complexity seems to be coming from alternate splicing.
    A report I recently read suggested that in higher organisms
    (e.g. humans) there may be an average of 3 proteins coming
    from each gene. That is a *lot* considering that for many
    genes probably only one protein is produced. It is going
    to make working out the proteomics a bear of a problem.

    Robert



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