The Mysterious World of the Human Genome by Frank Ryan

Author:Frank Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781633881532
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2016-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

In 2001, when the first draft of the complete human genome showed that roughly 45 percent of the human genome appeared to be made up of retroviruses, or virus-like entities, such as LINEs and SINEs, some biologists dismissed this huge genetic inheritance as junk, the graveyard of past viral infections. But today we have become a good deal more cautious in our interpretations. The 2001 papers in Science and Nature had shown that some 50 percent of the genome was accounted for between the protein-coding genes and the various virus-related sections, but the papers had also revealed that approximately 50 percent of our DNA appeared to code for nothing that we recognized at this time. Of course, some biologists once more labeled it junk, but others were now more cautious. This new mystery would become the raison d’être of a deliberate investigative enterprise, inspired by the very shock of our exposed ignorance beyond the tiny 1.5 percent fraction of protein-coding genes. This investigation, involving a consortium of research groups worldwide, would be encouraged and funded by a public research project launched by the National Human Genome Research Institute in the United States in September 2003. Its acronym was derived from the very nature of the mystery: the “Encyclopedia of DNA coding elements”—ENCODE.

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