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Asked by beth456kelly to Amelia, Jim, Liz, Prateek, Richard on 20 Jun 2011.
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Prateek Buch answered on 19 Jun 2011:
that’s hard to say exactly – but most scientists estimate there are around 30,000 human genes, which is fewer than we’d imagined about 10-15 years ago. What’s interesting is that the number of genes has almost no relation to how complicated an organism is – grapes have as many if not more genes than humans, some fleas have lots more!
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Richard Badge answered on 19 Jun 2011:
Hi beth456kelly,
Great question, and Prateek has beaten me to the answer… I actually lost a bet (a pint of beer) on the number of human genes – this was a big subject of debate before the analysis of the human genome sequence was published in 2001.
I guessed there would be 80-100,000 human genes based on the sequence of chromosome 21 (one of the smallest human chromosome that was completed well before the rest). It turned out that I was very wrong, as chromosome 21 is unusually gene-rich: just goes to show that you always need to know what assumptions you are making in science!
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Lizzard O'Day answered on 20 Jun 2011:
this is mind blowing- so there are roughly 20,000 protein coding genes in the human genome… meaning genes that when expressed go on to make a protein in your cell and do some sort of function in your body… However- this constitutes only 1-2% of the human DNA– so what’s the rest doing? For the longest time scientists called this “junk DNA” and didn’t think it had a function– well we were wrong.. A whole new field has exploded of non-coding RNAs… which is genes that are expressed from DNA that don’t go on to make protein but rather stay as an RNA molecule and do all kinds of things in the cell… it will be interesting to see how many of these are discovered and how their importance will change in the future!
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