Answer to Question #156343 in Zoology for Arslan

Question

2. What percentage of human genes are regulatory genes? what about all organisms in general?

Answer 1

The human genome has many different regulatory sequences which are crucial to controlling gene expression. Conservative estimates indicate that these sequences make up 8% of the genome, however extrapolations from the ENCODE project give that 20-40%of the genome is gene regulatory sequence. Some types of non-coding DNA are genetic "switches" that do not encode proteins, but do regulate when and where genes are expressed (called enhancers).