Now: The Rest Of The Genome

Thomas R. Gingeras of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a leader of Encode, an effort to determine the function of every piece of DNA in the human genome. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)

From The International Herald Tribune:

Over the summer, Sonja Prohaska decided to try an experiment. She would spend a day without ever saying the word "gene." Prohaska is a bioinformatician at the University of Leipzig in Germany. In other words, she spends most of her time gathering, organizing and analyzing information about genes. "It was like having someone tie your hand behind your back," she said.

But Prohaska decided this awkward experiment was worth the trouble, because new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. "It cannot work that way," Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes.

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