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.