Evaluating the effects of silent genes on pairwise kinship testing.

Short tandem repeat (STR) loci are frequently utilized in kinship testing, and mutations of a single base occurring in the primer-binding region of the STR locus can result in the failure of allelic amplification and the emergence of silent genes. Silent genes are not observable and, therefore, are excluded from the genotypes assessed. Pedigree likelihood ratios (LRs) are often employed in kinship testing to determine the likelihood of different kinship scenarios.

Genomic data mining for functional annotation of human long noncoding RNAs.

Life may have begun in an RNA world, which is supported by increasing evidence of the vital role that RNAs perform in biological systems. In the human genome, most genes actually do not encode proteins; they are noncoding RNA genes. The largest class of noncoding genes is known as long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), which are transcripts greater in length than 200 nucleotides, but with no protein-coding capacity.