Thinking about defining the number of genes present in the maize genome reminded me of an old* story about the trouble of defining what truly represents a gene and how really awesome ideas can sometimes come years before the data needed to support them.
The year is 2002. The first complete version of the human genome is still a year away. The genomes of two plant species have already been published (rice and arabidopsis) but in terms of shere genome size, both species are a drop in the bucket compared to the human genome, or other plant genomes like corn or wheat. But none of this is particularly important except to set the stage.
Two researchers at Rutgers University were sequencing a tiny piece of the maize genome (~0.01%) that surrounded a single gene call bronze1 — the fifth most studied gene in maize — when they found something unexpected.
They had previously 10 identified genes in a single stretch of 32-kb of the maize genome. (A similar gene density throughout the remainder of the maize genome would have resulted in a maize genome containing more than 700,000 genes!) However it was already known that the maize genome was split between small gene-rich islands and vast desolate expanses of transposons (referred to as transposon nests**), and in fact the same study identified a couple of these nests of transposons on either side of their gene rich island (see part A of the second picture in this post).
Below I'll use cartoons, but here's a real and to scale example of a gene rich island I picked at random from maize chromosome 3. Genes and intergenic spaces are to scale. Base image generated with GenomeViewer, part of the CoGe toolkit. http://www.genomevolution.org/CoGe/
Their initial sequencing used DNA from a breed of corn called McC, which I must admit I’ve only ever read about in this particular paper. However, when they decided to sequenced the same region from the genome of B73*** they made three discoveries which I’ve listed in increasing order of strangeness: (more…)
