title: Reconciling the numbers: ESTs versus protein-coding genes.
abstract: The number of expressed sequences greatly surpasses the estimated number of protein-coding genes in mammalian genomes. An evolutionary approach reveals that only 9% to 14% of human-expressed and mouse-expressed sequences are able to code for proteins. Clustering of these sequences using cross-species relationships suggests that millions of expressed sequences may correspond to only approximately 20,000 distinct protein-coding transcripts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The Huck Institutes for Life Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA. nekrut@psu.edu
authors.forename: Anton
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nekrutenko
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D015894:Genome, Human; D023281:Genomics; D006801:Humans; D051379:Mice / Q000235:genetics*; D016366:Open Reading Frames / Q000235:genetics*; D011506:Proteins / Q000235:genetics*
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins