Indo-US team discovers 43 genes

Scientists call it a genetic marvel in Baltimore, writes Lalit K Jha.

Research of X-Chromosome carried out by a team of scientists from India and the US has discovered as many as 43 new genes: A feat considered to be genetic marvel by scientists in Baltimore.

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The team's accomplishment has been described in the April issue of the prestigious Nature Genetics.

Akhilesh Pandey, leader of the research team said: "This is the first time that critical analysis of an entire chromosome has been done by a group, which was not involved in determining genetic sequence of the chromosome."

Assistant professor at McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, Johns Hopkins, Pandey claimed findings would speed research into diseases associated with X chromosome and encourage similar analyses of other chromosomes.

Regions of the X chromosome, one of the two sex chromosomes (Y is the other), have been linked to mental retardation and numerous other disorders, but finding the particular genetic abnormalities involved has been difficult, he observed.

Pandey, who is also the chief scientific adviser to the Bangalore-based Institute of Bioinformatics (IOB), where the analyses took place, said as many as 26 scientists for 18 months carefully studied publicly available sequence of X-Chromosome to identify the genes.

It was then compared with those of chimpanzees, rats and mice.

In the regions that were the same between species, the team found 43 new "gene structures" that encode proteins.

"Some of the newly identified genes sit in regions long tied to X-linked mental retardation syndromes, which appear only in boys, or other disorders," he observed.

Quite remarkably, he said almost half of the new genes don't look like any previously known genes, nor do they look like each other.