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?