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Extreme genes!

We just saw an example of an extreme gene - a gene with more transcripts than any other - 150 of them!

Challenge

Use filter() and/or arrange() to identify this gene. What is it?

Does it also have lots of transcripts in other species, such as mouse? (Note. you may need to add the 'Name' column into the transcripts_summary dataframe to figure this out - or else use the gene ID to find it.)

Explore this gene using the UCSC genome browser and Ensembl, or other sources such as Uniprot and see what you can discover about it. (Watch out though, it has so many transcripts that it might take a while to load!)

Looking for extreme genes is extremely fun - let's go and look for some others.

Challenge

What is:

  • the largest gene in each species (by length on the genome)?
  • The smallest?
  • The gene with the most transcripts?
  • ...or the most exons?
  • The longest or shortest coding sequence?

If you've followed so far you have most of the tools you need to solve these, but still they can take a bit of thought. In the next few pages we'll give some tips on how you could answer these questions.