发信人: Marble (小石头哥哥), 信区: Biology
标 题: Comment on the EST technology
发信站: The unknown SPACE (Wed Mar 27 13:27:21 2002) WWW-POST

I was listening to a speech given by J. Craig Venter the other day. It was a
very impressive one, though it was much more like elementary education to the
general audience. One thing that really impressed me is the expressed sequence
tags technology (ESTs), which was developed and applied by J. Craig Venter to
discover a multitude of new genes and consequently integrated into the Human
Genome Project. The explosion of discovering new genes with the help of
mathmatics and computers was realized only with the immerge of the EST
technology. Basically, the current estimated genes for human beings are about
26,000, and 23,000 for the Mus musculus. This number is pretty surprising to
most biologists due to the large size of the genome, which means that almost
99% of the genome is "junk". The number of the known ESTs (or publicly
available) is about 20 folds of the gene numbers. I do not know how well the
ESTs can represent the proposed 26K genes, and hope someone could educate more
on this topic. My understanding is that the quality of the ESTs is definitely
a prerequisite for the following studies.


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