Top 10%
Americans explained the increased popularity of 10 percent of genes among researchers
Ekaterina Rusakova, N+1
"Hot" and "cold" regions of the genome. Genes are mapped according to known biological and chemical characteristics. The genes that are studied more often are marked in red, and those that are studied less often in blue. A drawing from an article in PLoS Biology.
American biologists have explained why researchers are actively studying only 10 percent of human genes, while 28 percent of genes are practically unexplored, according to PLoS Biology (Stoeger et al., Large-scale investigation of the reasons why potentially important genes are ignored).
Among the reasons for this bias are historical ones, biologists prefer to study already studied genes, for which there are many publications; the availability of material – genes from which more protein is expressed is preferable; the availability of studies of model organisms.
Researchers have repeatedly noticed that there is a strong bias in the study of human genes. Scientists are actively investigating only two thousand protein-coding genes out of 19-20 thousand genes contained in the human genome. The reasons for increased attention to some genes and lack of interest in others may be both the not too great importance of most genes for medical and social research, as well as the established system of financial support for research, the availability of technologies and reagents, or the intuition of scientists choosing an object for work.
Biologists from Northwestern University (USA), led by Thomas Stoeger and Luis Amaral, decided to figure out why this is happening. They analyzed information from 36 sources and collected 430 characteristics of 12948 genes, including the date of discovery and properties of RNA and proteins corresponding to these genes. It turned out that for 33 percent of human genes, the list of characteristics was incomplete. Therefore, after the initial analysis, the researchers selected 15 characteristics that made the greatest contribution to the model they created, and which were available for 15 thousand genes. Among them were the amount of RNA and protein that are synthesized on a particular gene, their length, the properties of proteins (for example, their charge or hydrophobicity), the sensitivity of the gene to mutations. The researchers used these 15 characteristics to predict the relationship between the number of publications devoted to the study of a particular gene and its properties.
The researchers found that 27 percent of the genes from the human genome were studied only indirectly. Not a single independent publication is dedicated to them. The authors found several main criteria by which researchers choose the object of their scientific interests. Firstly, it is the presence of earlier publications and intensive research of a particular gene in the past. Thus, 16 percent of human genes that were studied before 1991 and which were the subject of publications continued to interest scientists in 2015: 49 percent of articles for this year were devoted. Another reason was the presence of studies of model organisms – mice, rats, fruit flies, frogs. At the same time, it was not important whether the researchers studied human genes in model organisms or some genes of the animals themselves. The availability of protein or RNA was also important for the choice of the object of study. The more substances could be synthesized from a particular gene, the more popular the object of research it was. Among other reasons, the authors of the work called probable difficulties with a career and financial support. Young researchers studying "unpopular" genes are half as likely to receive research funding and become independent.
Previously, researchers have shown that the reputation of scientists facilitates the publication of their articles. Editors of scientific journals more often decide to accept an article for publication if they and the authors of the articles previously had joint publications. The authors note that the study was conducted only for an eight-year interval and four journals devoted to computer science.
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