On Estimating Functional Gene Number in Eukaryotes

Authors

• Stephen J. O'Brien, National Institute of Child Health and Human DevelopmentFollow

ORCID

0000-0001-7353-8301

ResearcherID

N-1726-2015

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Nature New Biology

ISSN

0090-0028

Publication Date

3-14-1973

Abstract

MANY recent studies have been concerned with the construction of biological model systems to describe adequately regulation of gene action during development of eukaryotes1–5. The number of genes in mammals and Drosophila has been suggested to be 1 to 2 orders of magnitude less than the amount of available DNA per haploid genome could provide2–7. Although Drosophila and mammalian nuclei contain enough unique DNA to specify for respectively 105 and 106 genes of 1,000 nucleotide pairs8,9, it has been argued that a much lower estimate of functional gene number is more reasonable2–7. Conversely, these conclusions indicate that more than 90% of the eukaryotic genome may be composed of nonfunctional or noninformational “junk” DNA. Here we demonstrate these estimations have not been fundamentally proven; rather they are based on simplifying assumptions of questionable validity, in some cases contradictory to experimental data.

DOI

10.1038/newbio242052a0

Volume

242

Issue

115

First Page

52

Last Page

54

Comments

©1973 Nature Publishing Group

NSUWorks Citation

O'Brien, Stephen J.. 1973. "On Estimating Functional Gene Number in Eukaryotes." Nature New Biology 242, (115): 52-54. doi:10.1038/newbio242052a0.