Database lists human genes
International effort creates resource for geneticists.
20 April 2004
HELEN PEARSON

Researchers have compiled a comprehensive catalogue of over 21,000 human
genes: as many as three-quarters of the total number of genes thought to be
in our genome.

Experts say the catalogue, called the Human Full-length Complementary-DNA
Annotation Invitational Database (H-Invitational Database), will help
geneticists identify what each gene does in the human body, including their
contribution to certain diseases.

"It is a tremendous resource," says Len Pennacchio who studies human
genomics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Although researchers have the human genome sequence largely in hand, they
still struggle to work out which sections are genes, the stretches of code
that provide instructions for making proteins, and which are simply filler.
Computer programs that try to predict which bits constitute genes are
notoriously unreliable.

Details of the H-Invitational Database, which was created by an
international team led by Takashi Gojobori of the Center for Information
Biology and the DNA Data Bank of Japan in Mishima, are reported in the
Public Library of Science Biology1.

Analysis of the gene set has already thrown up some interesting findings. It
seems, for example, that the sequences at the beginning and end of genes
tend to be longer than those in the middle, although no one yet knows why.
"There's something funky going on at the front and back of
genes," says Ewan
Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, Britain.

Read the rest at Nature
http://www.nature.com/nsu/040419/040419-3.html

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