The Popularity Contest of Human Genes

Since 2003, several researchers have noticed that scientists tend to study genes that are already well studied, and the genes that become popular aren’t necessarily the most biologically interesting ones. Even among genes, it seems, the rich get richer. This trend hasn’t changed in the past two decades, according to a new study from Thomas Stoeger from Northwestern University. Through a massive analysis of existing biomedical data, he found that he can predict how intensely a given gene is studied based on a small number of basic biochemical traits. Most of these, he says, reflect how easy a gene was to investigate in the 1980s and 1990s, rather than how important it is.“People said that knowing all the genes was going to change everything,” says Luis Amaral, who led the new study. But the 16 percent of genes that were known in 1991 still accounted for half of all biomedical papers in 2015. By contrast, more recently discovered genes are more poorly known, and a quarter (27 percent) have never been the focus of a scientific paper. Based on current trends, Stoeger estimates that it would take at least five decades before every gene was characterized at the most basic level, let alone fully understood. “There’s a chance that we are missing out on a lot of interesting biology,” he says.See it on Scoop.it, via Viruses, Immunology & Bioinformatics from Virology.uvic.ca
The Popularity Contest of Human Genes
Source: Viral Bioinformatics