The Ever-Shrinking Human Protein-Encoding Genome

A news article posted on Medical News Today on September 3rd reports on a scientific journal article written in Nucleic Acids Research, which hypothesizes that many fewer genes in the human genome code for proteins than previously thought. This process of discovering all the functional genes in the human genome began with the Human Genome project, which at the onset found approximately 40,000 functional human genes, but throughout the project decreased that number to 20-25,000. This study in Nucleic Acids Research cross-referenced three different proteome databases looking for pseudogenes that were identified as functional genes, and found substantial evidence for close to 3,000 and potentially greater than 4,000 pseudogenes. These findings provide strong data for the number of functional human genes settling below 20,000, and most likely lower than that. Fewer functional human genes means that fields such as gene therapy and biomedicine do not have to sort through pseudogenes to find genes responsible for certain human traits or disease, and therefore isolating the function of different human genes a less clunky process.