Zack Exley

The geneome is a network, not a checklist of traits 15 June, 2007

Not too many decades ago, scientists tried to link personality characteristics, intelligence and propensity for certain kinds of behavior or mental disorders to bumps on human skulls. In our time, scientists do something equally as silly by trying to map the same mysterious and enormous phenomena to individual genes.

A major international collaborative study has just given us a little bit of relief from that sort of present-day pseudoscience:

An international research consortium today published a set of papers that promise to reshape our understanding of how the human genome functions. The findings challenge the traditional view of our genetic blueprint as a tidy collection of independent genes, pointing instead to a complex network in which genes, along with regulatory elements and other types of DNA sequences that do not code for proteins, interact in overlapping ways not yet fully understood.

…The new data indicate the genome contains very little unused sequences and, in fact, is a complex, interwoven network. In this network, genes are just one of many types of DNA sequences that have a functional impact. “Our perspective of transcription and genes may have to evolve,” the researchers state in their Nature paper, noting the network model of the genome “poses some interesting mechanistic questions” that have yet to be answered.

More here.