5 ms·
I went to the article to try and dig up information about the orthologues, but as is kind of par for the course these days, the meat of the useful information i
by hirenj 11y ago
I went to the article to try and dig up information about the orthologues, but as is kind of par for the course these days, the meat of the useful information is not readily available.
If you go to the supplementary information, you can find an excel sheet with the locus and amino acid sequences for all the genes. It's then just a matter of blasting the unknown function genes against the human genome and using a cutoff for similarity. I'm going to have to wait to do this next week, but if any enterprising soul wants to do this, you can get the supplementary data here:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6280/aad6253/suppl/DC1 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6280/aad6253/suppl...
- sevenless 11y agoLooking at that supplementary Excel spreadsheet, only 42 of those essential genes are annotated as "hypothetical protein/unknown function/unclear functional category". For example, locus MMSYN1_0421 has unknown function, but belongs to the alkaline shock protein family, so we can't say we have no idea what it does. They seem to be the only loci where we're truly in the dark. There are many more with "putative" or "probable" roles and known homologs. In total the headline seems to be misleading. We're only truly lost on about 9% of these essential genes.