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.