Posted: Mar 01, 2017 10:23 pm
Wortfish wrote:Knowles and Mclysaght claimed that CLLU1 is protein-coding in humans but not in other primate lineages because there is a valid ORF in the former. That is what they mean by de novo. The NCBI refutes this claim, stating that it is actually a ncRNA gene that is present in humans and other primates. As such, there is nothing de novo about it at all.
True if, in fact, it is functionally transcribed in both humans and other primates. But we don't know that, or at least, noone has shown whether it is transcribed at a significant level in anything but humans. Orthologous sequences exist in our primate cousins, but whether they are similar enough to other transcription factor binding sites in those primate genomes, in order to recruit transcription factors and get expressed at selectively/physiologically significant levels, remains to be seen.
Of course, lacking an open reading frame, it will not constitute a de novo protein coding gene. It might still constitute a de novo ncRNA. But to settle that we need transcription data from other primates.