by Aravindan Neelakandan - Feb 12, 2021 10:57 AM A jellyfish (Unsplash) Snapshot The work that Sudhakaran Prabakaran and his team have done over the past five years strongly suggests that our definition of a gene has been extremely conservative. If physicists have their dark matter, molecular biologists have their dark DNA or dark genome. Now a dynamic team of young biologists from across the planet, the Prabakaran Group, is cracking its secrets like never before. Let's start from the basics. What is a gene? The gene is that part of the DNA strand that codes for a protein. That is a strict and conservative textbook definition. But then, for quite a considerable number of years now, scientists studying the genome have been facing a problem.