Jérôme Reboul, David Hill, Philippe Vaglio, and Marc Vidal have developed a method for confirming genes that other methods miss. They found evidence for a high gene count in C. elegans, suggesting that the low predictions in humans and other organisms may be falling short. Photo by Graham Ramsay |
Human genome tally: Is recount in order?Different methods of counting genes result in faulty comparisons of biological complexityMarch 23, 2001The surprising finding that humans have fewer genes than expected led to endless speculations and editorial comments. Would biotech stocks be threatened? Should humans be more humble? Were entirely new theories needed to explain our biological complexity? But these opionions all relied on the idea that comparing the draft sequences of the human genome that were published in February 2001 to sequences of genes in other animals, such as the worm C. elegans, were in fact apples to apples comparisons. Hold everything, said a Harvard Medical School research team. Any comparison depends on how we count genes. And a study published in the March 2001 Nature Genetics, led by Marc Vidal, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of genetics at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, offered evidence for a relatively high gene count in the worm C. elegans, calling into question the accuracy of methods that produce a lower count in other species, including humans. Vidal and his team want a recount. |
