• Question: How many genes are in the human body

    Asked by Jumbone to Reka, Ajay, Kate, Kuntal, Pip on 4 Nov 2016. This question was also asked by Doctor strange, maizy, Issy4219.
    • Photo: Reka Nagy

      Reka Nagy answered on 4 Nov 2016:

      Short answer: around 21,000.
      Long answer: That’s a great question. Before the human genome got sequenced for the first time, scientists placed bets on how many genes there would be in the human body. Most of them expected around 60,000 (but the highest bet was for a whopping 153,438!). This was because they thought that the more complex an organism, the more genes they would need to have, and having previously found that the fruit fly had 13,000 genes, they thought that clearly, humans must have many more because they are a lot more complex than flies! Imagine their surprise when the first human genome sequence was completed and this number was three times lower than what most scientists had bet on!

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