Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Donnelly Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Research have found nearly one million new exons—stretches of DNA that are expressed in mature RNA—in the human genome.

The findings were published in the journal Genome Research.

There are around 20,000 protein-coding genes in humans that contain approximately 180,000 known internal exons. These protein-coding regions account for only one percent of the entire human genome. The vast majority of what remains is a mystery—aptly referred to as the “dark genome.”