More than 50 years ago, scientists came up with a definition for the gene: a sequence of DNA that is copied into RNA, which is used as a blueprint for assembling a protein.
More than 50 years ago, scientists came up with a definition for the gene: a sequence of DNA that is copied into RNA, which is used as a blueprint for assembling a protein.
In recent years, however, with the discovery of ever more DNA sequences that play key roles in gene expression without being translated into proteins, this simple definition needed revision, according to Gerald Fink, the Margaret and Herman Sokol Professor in Biomedical Research and American Cancer Society Professor of Genetics in MIT’s Department of Biology.
Fink, a pioneer in the field of genetics, discussed the evolution of this definition during yesterday’s James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award Lecture, titled, “What is a Gene?”
“In genetics, we’ve lost a simple definition of the gene — a definition that lasted over 50 years,” he said. “But loss of the definition has spawned whole new fields trying to understand the unknown information in non-protein-coding DNA.”
Read more at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
