Powerful tools are revealing the ‘control knobs’ of the genome
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Researchers are learning how to decode the DNA sequences that regulate gene expression. Credit: jxfzsy/iStock via Getty
For all that scientists talk of ‘decoding the genome’, the messy reality is that the genome isn’t even written in a single language. Scientists are fluent in the three-nucleotide codons that make up the protein-coding genes in DNA, but these represent only about 2% of the genomic text. The remainder is written in an entirely distinct language, which researchers are yet to untangle.
“Whenever we sequence a human individual, we get about 3.5 million variants, and only 0.6% of those will be in coding regions,” says Nadav Ahituv, a geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco. That fraction is relatively easy to interpret, Ahituv says, but for the rest, “we really don’t understand what it’s doing — we don’t have a regulatory code”.
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