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The human genome may contain more protein-coding genes than prior analyses suggested. A study published last month (May 29) on BioRxiv provides an expanded database of approximately 5,000 novel genes—of those, around 1,000 code for proteins, expanding the estimated number of protein-coding genes from around 20,000 to 21,000.
“If people like our gene list, then maybe a couple years from now we’ll be the arbiter of human genes,” study coauthor Steven Salzberg, a computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University, tells Nature.
Salzberg and his colleagues compiled a catalog of human genes and transcripts using data from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project, in which scientists sequenced the RNA from various tissues in hundreds of human subjects. By comparing the sequenced RNA to the human genome, the ...
