Scientists are uncovering the hidden switches in our genome that dial gene expression up and down, but much work lies ahead to peel back the many layers of regulation.
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24 October 2016
An earlier version of this feature misrepresented the role of Ran Elkon in using the advanced editing system.
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Chi, K. The dark side of the human genome. Nature 538, 275–277 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/538275a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/538275a
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Correction
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Jeffrey Boore
Actually, in contrast to the words of the first figure legend, the human genome IS packed with 'junk' as previously thought, despite the fact that many regulatory regions have been identified within that junk, as has always been expected.
Marek Bronislaw Majorek
Kelly Rae Chi reports that the ENCODE project as well as the Roadmap Epigenomics Project are making good progress discovering ?hundreds of thousands of functional regions in the human genome whose task is to control gene expression? (K.E. Chi Nature 538, 275-277; 2016). This is very encouraging, but it should not obscure the fact that from a certain point of view both are doomed to failure. The completion of the Human Genome Project was hailed as providing ?the book of life?, giving us the key to the understanding of the origin of the human form. Only a couple of year later the ENCODE project was initiated motivated primarily by the insight that the meagre 20000 or so genes discovered in the course of the Human Genome Project, accounting for the meagre 1-2% of the genome are not sufficient to explain how the human body arises. It puzzles me that scientists involved in the hunt for hidden control mechanisms of the genome do not realise that no matter what useful insights they will undoubtedly provide, from a higher point of view their efforts are ultimately doomed to failure. For the logic of the situation is unequivocal and unrelenting: irrespective of how many further levels of controlling mechanisms will one day be discovered in the genome, they are all present in all cells of the same organism. Thus within this paradigm it will forever remain inexplicable why only some of these mechanisms become active in concert in a cell of a given type. And it will have to remain even more puzzling how it can come about that a number of various cells ?band together? to form highly complex organs, and how it can come about that these complex organs ultimately ?band together? to form the marvel of the human body. The influences controlling these processes cannot come from inside of a cell. That such extra-cellular influences can exist should not be more surprising to us than the existence of radio waves that conjure up pictures on the screens of our TV sets. What prevents us from accepting such a possibility is a dogma that the universe must be explainable in terms of material causes. But dogmas should remain the lifeblood of the Catholic Church, not of natural science.