For almost entire past century, modern science fooled us by sharing fancy numbers of genes we possess.
The count started with 100000 and now reduced to 19000. I am sure, it will further reduce.
Why am I damn sure?
Your body is composed of an estimated 30 trillion human cells, but it is host to more than 100 trillion bacterial and fungal cells, the friendly microbes that coevolved with our species. Think about that: right now in your body bacterial cells substantially outnumber your own human cells.
If you are host to 100 trillion microbes and each microbe is a tiny genetic machine, how many genes are cranking away within your resident microbes and what are those genes doing?
The shift of numbers is from our genes to microbial genes. In other words, 99 percent of the unique genes in your body are bacterial, and only about 1 percent are human.
We acquire microbial genes, not only from parents but from environment i.e. our foster mother, Mother Nature.
And for healthy life, it is critical to live in healthy environment.
Sheer presence[1] of microbial world in our Body proves one thing for sure that idea of ‘dog-eat-dog world of Darwinian competition’ is utter nonsense. Sadly, same survival of the fittest idea is so much ingrained in our psyche by modern education that we waste precious youth life in chasing false alarms and unnecessary competitions.
Life is about living for each other, helping each other. Darwinian illusion is catastrophic. Unlearn it..If we cannot unlearn, we are like those pathogens who make us feel sick selfish and self-centered.
Multiple evidence strands suggest that there may be as few as 19 000 human protein-coding genes
https://academic.oup.com/hmg/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/hmg/ddu309
Determining the full complement of protein-coding genes is a key goal of genome annotation. The most powerful approach for confirming protein-coding potential is the detection of cellular protein expression through peptide mass spectrometry (MS) experiments. Here, we mapped peptides detected in seven large-scale proteomics studies to almost 60% of the protein-coding genes in the GENCODE annotation of the human genome. We found a strong relationship between detection in proteomics experiments and both gene family age and cross-species conservation. Most of the genes for which we detected peptides were highly conserved. We found peptides for >96% of genes that evolved before bilateria. At the opposite end of the scale, we identified almost no peptides for genes that have appeared since primates, for genes that did not have any protein-like features or for genes with poor cross-species conservation. These results motivated us to describe a set of 2001 potential non-coding genes based on features such as weak conservation, a lack of protein features, or ambiguous annotations from major databases, all of which correlated with low peptide detection across the seven experiments. We identified peptides for just 3% of these genes. We show that many of these genes behave more like non-coding genes than protein-coding genes and suggest that most are unlikely to code for proteins under normal circumstances. We believe that their inclusion in the human protein-coding gene catalogue should be revised as part of the ongoing human genome annotation effort.
