act elsewhere." The important parts of such definitions are: (1) that a gene corresponds to a transcription unit; (2) that genes produce both mRNA and noncoding RNAs; and (3) regulatory sequences control gene expression but are not part of the gene itself. However, there's one other important part of the definition and it is emphasized in Kostas Kampourakis' book "Making Sense of Genes." "Therefore in this book I will consider genes as DNA sequences encoding information for functional products, be it proteins or RNA molecles. With 'encoding information,' I mean that the DNA sequence is used as a template for the production of an RNA molecule or a protein that performs some function.' The emphasis on function is essential because there are stretches of DNA that produce non-functional transcripts and they don't qualify as genes. These include obvious examples such as transcribed pseudogenes as well as less obvious examples such as junk RNA produced as noise due to transcription errors. In order to qualify as a true gene, by this definition, one has to prove that the transcript has a biological function. Early speculations on the size of a typical gene were based on high resolution genetic mapping and on the size of proteins and RNA molecules. A length of 1500 base pairs seemed reasonable at the time (1965). This was based on the idea that the gene was the DNA that was directly responsible for production of the functional product. The discovery of introns in the 1970s meant that many eukaryotic genes were much larger than the size of the functional product would imply. Typical mammalian protein-coding genes, for example, are about 62,000 base pairs in length (transcribed region) and since there are about 20,000 of them they occupy about 35-40% of the mammalian genome (including the human genome). In spite of the fact that both protein-coding genes and noncoding genes have been known for more than 50 years, there are still a number of textbooks, websites, and scientific publications that define a gene as a DNA sequence that specifies a protein. In other words, the definition is restricted to protein-coding genes. Here's an example from a recent article in American Scientist. ... to truly assess the potential significance of de novo genes, we relied on a strict definition of the word "gene" with which nearly every expert can agree. First, in order for a nucleotide sequence to be