What I believed that one gene codes for just one polypeptide seems to be incorrect. I am reading the book Intelligent Bioinformatics where AI techniques relevant for bioinformatics are discussed. In the preliminary chapters, the author says that the belief that one gene can only code for one polypeptide is wrong.
Honestly, I was not aware of this. But, the author says that one gene can produce many different polypeptide chains depending on how many introns are removed and how many exons are shuffled or differently spliced.
Isn’t this cool? The same information can be processed in more than way and having multiple interpretations. It is like same software producing different output depending upon environment. What really amazes me is the fact that cells achieve all this without someone actually telling it how do do it. There is no central authority, yet the cell has conceived extreme examples of complexity. Many more things are waiting to be discovered.
I believe that no matter how clever we become or in how much detail we explore the cell, biology always has something to surprise and amaze us.
I just wish I keep on discovering such facts. 🙂
An another fact from the same book: Some of the longer introns may contain other genes (wow), each with their own introns.
This hierarchy of information is really spellbounding.