Like a traveler picking up a new language, geneticists are starting to recognize phrases and sentences as they read the babble of bases in the human genome. These grammatical constructs are discrete blocks of DNA that differ from one person to the next. And they may be common enough and account for enough of the genome, researchers concluded at a conference* held here last week, that it's time to create a new map of the genome, one that describes its blocky structure.
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Laura Helmuth (2001) studied this question.
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