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Published online 2 November 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1199
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Human genes are multitaskers
Up to 94% of human genes can generate different products.
Although people often struggle to master more than one discipline, our genes are accomplished polymaths. Genome-wide surveys of gene expression in 15 different tissues and cell lines have revealed that up to 94% of human genes generate more than one product.
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It's a exciting discovery. It means not only that a breakthrough in the field of biology is coming but also that many other fields may absorb more ideas from biology to resolve their puzzles. Computer scientists, for example, can find some inspiration in this discovery to resolve many difficult problems about the structures of programs and the protocols of Internet. A cell of human beings is the most perfect computer in this world, perfect data structures, perfect algorithms and perfect protocols of communications.
I agree with the statement: ""What really needs to be done is to develop high-throughput methods for analysing the function of these splice variants," says Blencowe. "That's the big challenge ahead". At this point, we must know what I've demonstated earlier,that gene mutations parallel biological dysfunctions, nowadays bedside assessed: http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2008/10/28/laura-james-on-science-and-journalism/#comments http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081006/full/news.2008.1152.html?q=2#last-comment http://blogs.nature.com/nm/spoonful/2008/03/gout_gene.html http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55106/
This was expected by a large number of biologists from day one that just because human beings were complex structurally and behaviorally, it did not mean that they must be endowed with proportionally larger number of genes. The only exceptions were those who were either crassly mechanistic in their approach to questions in biology or the ones who attributed too much importance to human being as certain special entity! That diversity could be brought out by other means like in the case of generation of innumerable varieties of anti-bodies from rather limited sequences of nucleotides was known for years now. Living, after all, is a process of variety generation and better adept in that process is better adapted to be alive!
Although biologists say the genome is identical in the cells throughout the body assuming mitosis is mere duplication of the parent cell structures, yet they (identical chemical structures) behave and fuction differently! What kind of chemistry is that! The finding reported is extremely significant because it adds one more scientific proof that the material gene (or the genome) does not constitute the biological program for the simple reason a molecule cannot have more than one kind of information encoded by its structure. How will chemists explain this anomaly? More strangely, the DNA structure although in tact, loses all its ?information? at death. How can a chemical structure lose its property? Recently a research group at the J. Craig Venter Institute, U.S.A., has artificially produced the complete genome of an organism Mycoplasma genitalium, a parasitic bacterium with the smallest genome for any free-living cell. That was another landmark achievement in biology because the genome did not spring to life defying all our theories of origin of life, evolutionary theory, etc! That work proved that life cannot emerge from non-life. Putting these two studies together, we find that genome is not biological program. Molecular gene has misfired. (See also the book The Great Gene Fiasco published by Adam Publishers, New Delhi). Wilhelm Johannsen, who proposed the gene concept in 1911 had cautioned that the gene should not be considered as material entity. He is correct. The biological program (the biosoftware) of an organism is stored on the chromosomes (hard disk) like we install our computer programs in the machine. An organism is a biocomputer. A detailed discussion of the computer model of the organism may be found elsewhere (The Computer Universe published by Adam Publishers, New Delhi.) This model permits one to define, explain and understand the phenomena of life and death. It is time that we rejected the molecular gene, which is nothing but hardware for protein synthesis. P.A. Wahid
Perhaps Mr. Wahid would enjoy reading about epigenetics. Epigenetics research has shown that in spite of having the same genetic material (or DNA), cells in the body are different because different cell types express different genes. The expression is controlled, in part, by methyl and acetyl groups that can attach to the histones the DNA winds around, or to the DNA itself, making the DNA wind tighter or looser around the histones. Tighter windings make it more difficult for the gene to be exposed to the sea of molecules in the nucleus, turning the gene off. Looser windings make it easier for a gene to be expressed, turning the gene on. I like to think of the DNA being analogous to computer hardware, and the methyl and acetyl switches being somewhat analogous to software. I would love to know how to write this software.
The report highlights the importance of sequences (which may or not be protein coding but may play a role in alternative splicing) in a gene that might be functional - in a disease association analysis, for example.
An important and exciting work.. To be noted that I already published previously that AS affects more that 90% of human genes (see the APICdb paper, PMID: 18388144).