KeithHarwood

Don't knock it. Maybe VZ is finally starting to realise that science is about discovering new things, not just re-interpreting old things with new personal opinions.

Doubting Didymus

Science is about accepting or rejecting a hypothesis based on the current, most accurate data. It is NOT about rejecting a hypothesis because you anticipate data that will refute it in ten years or so.

I suggest to vanderzyden that, if you are serious about waiting for this marvellous new unbiased sequencing data that will prove you correct within the next ten years, to come back and talk to us when you have found it. See you in a decade.

lpetrich

The chimpanzee genome sequence is likely to be done in two years or less; it's on <a href="http://www.genome.gov/Pages/Research/Sequencing/Proposals" target="_blank">NHGRI's list of priority organisms</a>. Which includes:

Chimp
Rhesus Monkey
Cow
Dog
Chicken
Sea Urchin
Honeybee
Primitive metazoan Trichoplax adhaerens
Fungi (15 species)
Ciliate protozoans (2 species)

As the human-genome sequencing centers wind down their work on the human, mouse, and rat genomes, they will get to work on some of these species.

Doubting Didymus

Question: Does a complete sequencing tell us which genes are active? Or will we have to wait even longer to work out which parts are coding and which parts aren't.

lpetrich

One can recognize likely genes by seeing which parts have a start codon followed by several complete codons and then a stop codon. However, genes may contain "introns", parts that get snipped out before being used to make proteins, and such editing can be used to make different proteins from the same gene.

So one commonly-used way of looking for genes is looking for sequences that are similar in different genomes -- natural selection generally slows down the rate of evolution of genes, with more strongly-constrained genes getting more slowdown.

Thus has led to the discovery of conserved noncoding parts of the genome; these could be involved in gene regulation or they could code for RNA snippets used directly (transfer and ribosomal RNA's, for example).

Note: a codon is a nucleotide triplet that gets interpreted as an amino acid, a "start" command, or a "stop" command.

Doubting Didymus

So a full sequencing should give us a fair idea of how much active genetics we share, as well as the total amount that we share with chimps.

Another question: In your last post you seem to use the term 'gene' only for those sections of DNA that are actually used. This is not a use I am familiar with. Are non-coding sections still referred to as 'genes' or not?

monkenstick

vanderzyden, you don't have to wait ten years, you can see some of the similarity right now, in the urate oxidase pseudogene thread you never answered

fando

Here's a better article:

<a href="http://atcaltech.caltech.edu/tech-today/subpage.tcl?story_id=5641" target="_blank">http://atcaltech.caltech.edu/tech-today/subpage.tcl?story_id=5641</a>

Non-praying Mantis

I suspect that this "new" method of determining genetic relatedness will mean eventually revising the numbers for other organisms

NPM

Coragyps

Fando, that link makes it much clearer what they're talking about! Thanks!
(I really did read "program in Fortran," didn't I?)