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What Makes a Human?
Mounting evidence suggests a digital RNA-based regulatory network could spell the difference between humans and other animals
Email: John S. Mattick - j.mattick@imb.uq.edu.au The Scientist 2005, 19(4):32
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Sometimes it is hard to see the forest for the trees. Only 1.2% of the human genome's three billion base pairs encodes proteins. Recent estimates peg the mammalian protein-coding gene count at about 20,000–25,000, similar to other vertebrates and barely more than Caenorhabditis elegans (19,000), a simple, 1,000-cell nematode. Yet in humans these proteins help build a complex organism of nearly 100 trillion cells precisely arranged into many different organs and structures.
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