When it comes to vast, under-explored frontiers, space and Earth’s oceans come to mind. But even in human bodies, there’s still much to be discovered. Meet the “unknome,” a new database that emphasizes how much we still don’t know about human genes and proteins.
Cell biologist Sean Munro and colleagues compiled the unknome — a portmanteau of the words unknown and genome — to identify understudied but potentially important proteins and their corresponding protein-coding genes: DNA that copies a protein’s recipe into RNA (SN: 2/9/22).
Proteins are generally grouped into families that have a common evolutionary ancestor. The unknome database contains all protein families with at least one protein encoded by the human genetic instruction book, or genome, or by the genomes of 11 other commonly studied organisms. Over 13,000 groups and nearly 2 million proteins are included.
The unknome assigns a “knownness” score to each group of proteins based on how much is known about their corresponding genes. Some 3,000 of those groups, including 805 that contain at least one human protein, have a knownness score of zero, showing there’s still much to learn within the human genome (SN: 3/31/22).
2023-08-08 14:05:50
Original from www.sciencenews.org
rnrn
When it comes to vast, under-explored frontiers, space and Earth’s oceans come to mind. But even in human bodies, there’s still much to be discovered. Meet the “unknome,” a new database that emphasizes how much we still don’t know about human genes and proteins.
Cell biologist Sean Munro and colleagues compiled the unknome — a portmanteau of the words unknown and genome — to identify understudied but potentially important proteins and their corresponding protein-coding genes: DNA that copies a protein’s recipe into RNA (SN: 2/9/22).
Proteins are generally grouped into families that have a common evolutionary ancestor. The unknome database contains all protein families with at least one protein encoded by the human genetic instruction book, or genome, or by the genomes of 11 other commonly studied organisms. Over 13,000 groups and nearly 2 million proteins are included.
The unknome assigns a “knownness” score to each group of proteins based on how much is known about their corresponding genes. Some 3,000 of those groups, including 805 that contain at least one human protein, have a knownness score of zero, showing there’s still much to learn within the human genome (SN: 3/31/22).
2023-08-08 14:05:50
Original from www.sciencenews.org
rnrn