A new genetic map produced by a team of Ohio State geneticresearchers has twice the number of genes compared to two previously published maps, and provides information that explains the function of each individual gene.
This third map, defines the function and features of the human genes and shows how many genes actually exist in humans.
The research was done in collaboration with a team of researchers from Celera Genomics, which is a private biotechnology firm. The experiment, which was federally funded, was recently published in the Science and Nature journals.
Bo Yuan, principle investigator of the project and head of OSU’s division of human cancer genetics and bioinformatics group, said the third map will help determine the cause of diseases linked to genes and better define medical questions concerning genes.
The research suggests that there are probably between 65,000 and 75,000 transcriptional units. The two earlier reports believed that the human genome consisted of some 35,000 genes, a number which is far less than what was predicted by the third map.
The research also confirms some of the speculations reported in the Science and Nature journals, which predicted more human genomes than were previously thought to exist.
“For this experiment we used a different approach in research compared to the two previous maps,” Yuan said. “In this experiment the genome was reassembled more like the gene itself. This gives a better representation of human transcript information.”
Consisting of a group of 13 OSU researchers, the third map used 13 different databases to compare to the DNA sequences in the draft genome produced by the Human Genome Project, Yuan said. This helped determine the accuracy of the map.
“The Ohio State map also contains revealing information about tissue-specific genes, genes that are active in some tissues but not in others,” said Fred Wright, assistant professor of human cancer genetics and lead author of the paper. “This has important implications for biology and for disease mapping.”
Another implication of the third map was that researchers found genes that arrived from gene duplications. The recent study helps complete the list of gene functions and locations, which enables researchers to investigate them further, Yuan said.
