From: Kathryn Aegis (k_aegis@mindspring.com)
Date: Thu Sep 30 1999 - 21:38:15 MDT
This is the blurb I promised to send out during the genomics thread.
>From Friday, September 24, Washington Post.
HUMAN GENE ESTIMATE RAISED
There may be thousands more human genes than currently believed,
suggesting that scientists trying to unravel genetic disorders
may have a far more difficult job ahead, a pharmaceutical company said.
Researchers at Incyte Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Palo Alto, California,
one of the private entities competing to map every human gene,
believe about 140,000 genes make up the proteins that program cells
in the human body. Previous estimates put the number between 80,000
and 100,000.
While some inherited disorders are caused by single genes, other
diseases seem to result from groups of genes. Research into these
diseases will be more difficult if there are more genes, because
there could be more possible interactions among them. While the entire
human genome includes about 3 billion base pairs of DNA molecules, the
number of genes, or particular sequences of DNA, has always been an
estimate. Biologists can't yet tell exactly where one sequence ends and
another begins in the seemingly endless strands of molecules.
Incyte scientists came up with the new estimate by combining data from
two decoding methods.
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