A series of discoveries by an international consortium of scientists, including a team from The University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), will transform our understanding of how our genome works to produce a complex organism like a human being.
The findings of the consortium 'FANTOM', led by the Genomic Sciences Center, RIKEN Yokohama Institute and Genome Science Laboratory and RIKEN Wako Institute, will be published today in two papers in the prestigious journal Science.
Spokesman for the IMB team Professor David Hume, who has been a member of the FANTOM consortium for the past 5 years, and a senior author on both papers, said the massive data sets produced by the consortium, which were on the same scale as the completion of the human genome sequence, provided the scientific community with the tools to understand the control of protein production, truly the software of life.
"Genes provide the code for making the building blocks of our bodies - the proteins – and the consortium has a made a massive step towards identifying all of those building blocks. But the genome must also contain the code to ensure that protein building blocks are made in the right place at the right time.
"The new data provides several indications of the molecular basis of evolution and why we are so much more complex than the simple worm, despite the fact that we only have a small number of additional conventional genes.
"In simple terms, the data shows that in mammals each individual gene uses multiple different mechanisms to produce different forms of protein. In a sense, each 'gene' is actually multiple different genes," Professor Hume explained.