Distinguishing protein-coding and noncoding genes in the human genome

Although the Human Genome Project was completed 4 years ago, the catalog of human protein-coding genes remains a matter of controversy. Current catalogs list a total of approximately 24,500 putative protein-coding genes. It is broadly suspected that a large fraction of these entries are functionally meaningless ORFs present by chance in RNA transcripts, because they show no evidence of evolutionary conservation with mouse or dog. However, there is currently no scientific justification for excluding ORFs simply because they fail to show evolutionary conservation: the alternative hypothesis is that most of these ORFs are actually valid human genes that reflect gene innovation in the primate lineage or gene loss…

• UO
  University of California, Santa Cruz
• NI
  National Institutes of Health