Evolutionary comparison finds new human genes

Over millions of years of evolution, a gene called GRIA2 has continued to do it's job of making a receptor for neurotransmitters. The portions of the gene that code for amino acids that make up a protein change in different ways from other parts of the genome, so computer algorithms can use these distinctive patterns of evolutionary change to identify new genes that have been missed by other methods. A portion of GRIA2 is shown here in an alignment of the genomes of several species, beneath a graph of the computer analysis. Peaks in the graph identify exons (regions that are expressed), separated by introns (non-coding regions). When a cell reads the gene to make a protein the introns are edited out. Credit: Provided/Siepel