Potentially useful genes

Potentially useful genes are being ignored

The Human Genome Project was meant to change everything — but 15 years later, most research still tends to focus on the same old genes. Scientists applied machine learning to an exhaustive list of publications to determine the factors that predict when scientists will choose to study a particular gene. They found it’s partly due to the gene’s importance to human health, but a lot of it simply comes down to how easy the gene was to investigate in the 1980s and 1990s. “The 16 percent of genes that were known in 1991 still accounted for half of all biomedical papers in 2015,” notes The Atlantic, “and a quarter (27 percent) have never been the focus of a scientific paper.”

The Atlantic | 6 min read
Reference: PLOS Biology paper