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A team from the University of Cambridge set out to find whether new genes emerge in the genome of living organisms, and if they do, how they do so.
Findings of the research
- The team found that these regions are also broadly involved in diseases. The nORFs were seen as dysregulated in 22 cancer types. Dysregulated is a term which means that they could either be mutated, upregulated, or downregulated, or they could be uniquely present.
- A paper published last month by the team in npj Genomic Medicine noted that these regions were uniquely present in the cancer tissues and not present in the control tissue.
- They found that some nORF disruptions strongly correlated with the survival of patients. “More importantly, we show that nORFs proteins can form structures, can undergo biochemical regulation like known proteins and be targeted by drugs in case they are disrupted in diseases
- The researchers also identified these nORFs in Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite which causes the deadliest form of malaria
Way forward
- The team is now systematically ‘mining’ the dark genome to identify more such novel proteins and investigating whether they could be involved in disease processes..
- They have also identified 50 such novel proteins disrupted in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The results are yet to be peer-reviewed and published.
Source: The Hindu
