You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey.

Today's cool fact of the day is that human genes are getting a recount.

It turns out that figuring out how many genes are in our human genetic instruction manual,

the human genome isn't as easy as we once thought.

In fact, the definition of a gene has changed since they completed the human genome project

more than 15 years ago.

And we used to identify genes as stretches of DNA that had instructions that get copied

into RNA and turned into proteins.

But researchers still don't really agree on how many of those genes there are.

They range from 19,901 to 21,306.

And in the last decade, they realized that not all genes produce proteins.

So some scientists have expanded the definition of a gene to include genes that make RNAs

that don't turn into proteins but turn into other things.

So the number of those RNA-producing genes, which they call non-coding genes, is even

more up in the air than the protein-coding genes, according to Johns Hopkins University.

And it turns out there's about 25,000 of those RNA genes that they didn't think about.

So when someone tells you, oh, that's written into your genetic code, well, between this

fact that the genetic code is a bit blurry, and the fact that we have epigenetics, which

is how the environment turns genes on and off, well, the future isn't set in stone, at

least not genetically, at least not most of the time.

And the new total of human genes that's come out from all this research is about 46,831,

but not everyone agrees.

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