Perhaps Being Mysterious Is Part of Their Charm

Over at the Sandwalk, Larry Moran blogs about the thousands of unknown genes in sequenced genomes -- "'unknown' in the sense that no function has been assigned to their protein products." The catalyst for the post is a PLoS One paper on Neurospora crassa, which has some "9,000 protein-encoding genes and more than half of them have not been annotated," Moran writes. "The question is: are the unknown genes confined to Neurospora and its close relatives? If so, it would suggest that new genes have evolved within the past several million years and that's why we don't know their function," he writes.