And the Gene Number Is ...?

HUMAN GENOME PROJECTCOLD SPRING HARBOR, NEW YORK-- Biologists have long assumed that the more complex an organism is, the more genes it has. But last week at a meeting here, the generally accepted human gene count of 80,000 to 100,000 took a battering when researchers from Germany, the United States, and France offered revised estimates of the number of genes--all of them well below 50,000. The talks, some of which will be published in the June issue of Nature Genetics , sparked heated debates, with at least one genomicist countering with a new 100,000-plus estimate.