Sunday 8 August 2010

Are you sure this is a gene?

In 2006, a group of 500 scientists were given independently some real DNA sequences and asked whether each sequence qualified as a "gene". For many sequences, the opinion was split: about 60% answered they were confident that the sequences represented genes while 40% were confident that the sequences were not genes. The more specialized a scientist is in molecular biology, the less easy is to define what a gene actually is.

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