Only a tenth of the human genome is studied

ONE tale of Nasreddin, a self-satirising 13th-century philosopher, tells of the time he lost a precious ring. When his wife asks why he is searching in the yard rather than inside, where the ring was lost, Nasreddin explains that the light is better outside. Looking for something where the search is easiest is a form of bias now known as the “street light” effect. A study published this week in reports a similar skew in modern genetics that may be leaving thousands of important genes largely unstudied.There are roughly 20,000 genes in the human genome. Understanding genes and the proteins they encode can help to unravel the causes of diseases, and inspire new drugs to treat them. But most research focuses on only about ten percent of genes. Thomas Stoeger, Luis Amaral and their colleagues at Northwestern University in Illinois used machine learning to investigate why that might be.