One of our main findings is that the activity of these non-coding genes is controlled by the same transcription factors that regulate protein-coding gene activity.
Take the human genome: we only have about 25,000 protein-coding genes -- and we share large percentages of these genes with things like bananas and lettuce.
A typical protein-coding gene in humans might be divided into a dozen exons, each less than two hundred base pairs in length, and some as short as twenty to thirty.
Notably, alternative splicing allows the human genome to direct the synthesis of many more proteins than would be expected from its 20,000 protein-coding genes.