-Caveat Lector- In a message dated 01-02-12 20:06:18 EST, you write: << Orgone Biophysical Research Lab <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.orgonelab.org Forwarded News Item Please copy and distribute to other interested individuals and groups ********** Humans Have Fewer Genes Than Rats, or Rice If, after reading this, you feel the gene-biologists don't know what they are talking about, you are not alone. JD. +++++ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 17:37:38 EST Subject: Humans have fewer genes than rats What does this do to the theory of evolution? What about the 98% amount of genes we share with chimpanzees? Was that just an estimate? Where is the integrity of all this? When are they telling us good guesses and when are they telling us the truth? Fred Cline, S.F. San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, February 11, 2001 Genome Discovery Shocks Scientists Genetic blueprint contains far fewer genes than thought -- DNA's importance downplayed Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer Deepening the mystery of what makes us human, two scientific teams will publish the first maps of the human genome this week, revealing that the human genetic blueprint contains only a third as many genes as had been supposed. The publication of the maps is a milestone in the decadelong, multibillion-dollar effort to decipher the DNA that carries the set of instructions, passed on from parents to children, for making a human being. Until recently, scientists had expected to find as many as 100,000 genes in the genome. But the two scientific teams, reporting their findings this week in the journals Science and Nature, independently found only about 30,000 genes. The paucity of genes left scientists struggling to understand how humans could be so much more complex than other animals with essentially the same number of genes. "We have only 300 unique genes in the human (genome) that are not in the mouse," said Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics, the Maryland firm that led one of the mapping teams. "This tells me genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are." Francis Collins, leader of the U.S. contingent to the Human Genome Project, a consortium of publicly funded scientists from around the world, said the findings will force scientists to look for other factors to explain many aspects of health, disease and behavior. "We had a hard time explaining the (genetic) control mechanism when we thought there were 100,000 (genes)," Collins said. "Now we have only a third as many." Celera and the public scientists of the Human Genome Project have been rivals in the race to map the genome. In June, the two teams announced at a White House ceremony that they had read most of the 2.91 billion chemical letters found in each strand of human DNA. This week, in dozens of articles in the journals Science and Nature, Celera and the public team will publish their first efforts to unscramble the genetic secrets captured in that jumble of chemical letters. In an unusual move signaling the importance of the findings, Nature and Science planned to hold a press conference tomorrow. However, after some British newspapers violated a publishing embargo, the journals hastily gave the media the green light to run their stories today. Venter's team will publish its findings in Science, and the public project will publish theirs in Nature. The publications include other surprising findings, such as the discovery that vast stretches of noncoding regions in human DNA -- what has been called "junk DNA" -- may actually play an important role in driving and recording evolution. Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a scientific leader of the Human Genome Project, sounded awestruck as he summarized the article he and his scientific allies published in Nature. "I think the junk is the biggest surprise in the genome," Lander said. Lander said half of our genome seems to consist of repeating elements of DNA that have copied and inserted themselves into the sequence. Lander said scientists used these repetitive sequences to study how the genome evolved. They analyzed how the repeated sections became garbled as they were copied over and over, much as the original message gets garbled in a children's game of telephone. The more garbled the sequence, the older the repetition. Based on computer analyses of this garble, Lander said, scientists have dated when various sections of the genome were created. "It's as if we've found this ancient history that contains many legendary stories," Lander said. "We have just dug up the fossil record for 700 million years of evolution." The genome consists of 23 pairs of chromosomes, which are present in the nucleus of almost every human cell. Each chromosome hosts thousands of genes, strings of DNA letters that carry instructions for making one or more of the proteins constitute the body's chemical workforce. But genes are few and far between. Less than 1.5 percent of the genome seems to code for proteins, Lander said. Scientists thought it was twice as much before the map was done. Both scientific teams painted the genome as a landscape of vast dark stretches of repetitive chemical letters, interspersed with genes that seem as rare as city lights seen from an airplane at night. "The good news is that these two papers, which are the result of different approaches, offer pretty consistent findings, which increases our confidence that we're all on the right track," Collins said. Key findings include: -- How earlier gene counts went wrong: Years ago, scientists noticed that genes seemed to average 3,000 letters. Given early and accurate estimates of a genome roughly 3 billion letters long, that meant 100,000 genes -- provided genes were evenly distributed. Among the surprises in the maps, however, is just how unevenly genes are sprinkled throughout the 23 pairs of chromosomes that comprise our DNA. Venter's Science paper reports that chromosome 19 has 23 genes for every million DNA letters. Chromosome 2 has only five genes in the same expanse. Venter said that when his team sampled chromosome 19 and another relatively gene-rich region on chromosome 4 not long ago, they extrapolated their findings to a gene count for the whole genome -- and got it wrong. "It was a statistical fluke," he said. -- Uses for "junk DNA": Human DNA is constructed from two chemical strands that take the shape of a long, twisted ladder. The four chemical letters that make up each rung of the ladder follow a strict rule: chemical A always stands opposite T, and G pairs with C. But these four letters are not evenly distributed. The gene maps show that ATs outnumber GCs roughly 60-40. For reasons not completely clear, genes seem to cluster in GC rich regions, while so-called junk or repetitive DNA generally confines itself to AT zones. Lander said the one exception to the rule is a string of repetitive letters called the Alu sequence. Many Alu sequences cluster in the GC regions of the genome, alongside genes. Lander said that in 1998, Carl Schmid, a molecular biologist at the University of California at Davis, advanced what seemed like a nutty idea to explain Alu's unusual affinity for genes. Schmid suggested Alu sequences resided near genes because they weren't junk, but rather a mechanism to help cells repair themselves. With the entire genome map in front of them, showing so many instances of Alu sequences around genes, scientists are beginning to take Schmid seriously. "It looks pretty convincing," Collins said. Collins said scientists have found evidence that other repeat sequences have carried bits of useful DNA with them when they jumped around the genome, creating or modifying genes in the process. All of this suggests, as Collins put it, "that some of our junk isn't junk after all." -- Men, women and mutations: Public gene mappers made one finding that could thrust the genome into the battle of the sexes. The public scientists theorize that men pass on mutations to their offspring twice as often as women. They surmised this by comparing the genetic sequences of the X and Y chromosomes. Women have two Xs, men an X and a Y. The scientists analyzed the repeat elements on the Y chromosome and measured how often these repeats became garbled. After performing the same analysis on the X chromosome, they concluded "most mutation occurs in males." The public scientists suggested that the higher male mutation rate is due to the fact that men make billions of sperm, while women are born with far fewer eggs, only a few hundred of which mature in a lifetime. These numbers favor mutations being introduced when sperm-producing cells copy DNA on the Y chromosome. Whether this is good or bad is debatable, since mutations can both introduce disease and pass on advantageous traits. "Moms can look at dads and say, 'Two-thirds of the time you're responsible, " Lander quipped. "Dads can look at moms and say, 'Yes, but I'm doing two- thirds of the heavy lifting for evolution.' " -- Other explanations for complexity: As scientists struggle to explain human complexity with so few genes, they note that our genes are far better at multi-tasking than the genes of other species scientists have studied. "The average human gene can make three proteins, which is more than most people expected," Collins said. Even so, having come up so short on genes, scientists can't explain how humans can be so much more complicated than fruit flies, which have roughly half as many genes as humans. Part of the answer could lie in the makeup of human proteins. "In general the proteins in the human are more complex than the proteins in other organisms we've studied," said Mark Adams, vice president for genome research at Celera and a co-author on Venter's paper. "They are capable of more interactions, they do more things." This is important because molecular biologists see the human body as a machine, in which proteins serve as the gears, motors and pulleys that perform every task from flexing muscles to firing nerve synapses. Before the mapping project, genes were considered the control software in this analogy. But now that metaphor seems dated. The emerging view is that much of our complexity must derive from proteins, which interact to build physical systems somewhat independent of direction from the genome. Venter said all these findings undermine the concept of genetic determinism, the notion that genes determine everything from our behavior to our propensity toward illness. "It's become part of the common language to say we'd like to have the gene for this or the gene for that, but the common language is wrong," Venter said. "I believe all of our behaviors, all of our sizes and functions clearly have a genetic component but genes only explain a part of any process," he said. "We are around as a species because we have an adaptability that goes beyond the genome. If everything was hard-wired, we wouldn't have survived." On a whimsical note, scientists will wait two more years to decide who won their "gene pool." Last summer, more than 200 geneticists tossed a dollar into a hat and predicted how many genes would eventually be found. Estimates ranged >from 28, 000 to 200,000. From the start it was decided to put today's estimates to more tests. The winner will be announced at a genetics conference in 2003, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA. E-mail Tom Abate at [EMAIL PROTECTED] UNDERSTANDING THE HUMAN GENOME Geneticists have found about 30,000 genes in the human genome only a third as many as had been thought. -- What is DNA? Found in every living cell of every living thing, DNA is the instruction manual for life. The human body contains about 5 trillion cells, and within each one lies a nucleus that contains DNA strands. DNA holds the information to create proteins that cells need to grow and replicate themselves. Each DNA strand consists of a combination of four molecules that make up basepairs, the building blocks of an individual's entire genetic information or genome. -- Gene count Laboratory mouse: About 50,000 genes Fruit fly: 13,600 Thale cress, a plant: 25,500 Human: About 30,000 Rice: About 50,000 ********** OBRL News is a product of the non-profit Orgone Biophysical Research Lab Greensprings Research and Educational Center PO Box 1148, Ashland, Oregon 97520 USA http://www.orgonelab.org <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Building upon the discoveries of the internationally acclaimed natural scientist, Dr. Wilhelm Reich To subscribe to OBRL-News, send the message: subscribe obrl-news to the following address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Plain text email only! No "HTML-mail"!) To unsubscribe, or change to a new email address, firstly: unsubscribe obrl-news <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> to the same address above. 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