section_path: Genome/Number of genes
section_name: Number of genes
paragraph_text: Number of genes
  
  The genome size, and the number of genes it encodes varies widely between organisms. The smallest genomes occur in viruses, and viroids (which act as a single non-coding RNA gene). Conversely, plants can have extremely large genomes, with rice containing >46,000 protein-coding genes. The total number of protein-coding genes (the Earth's proteome) is estimated to be 5 million sequences.
  
  Although the number of base-pairs of DNA in the human genome has been known since the 1950s, the estimated number of genes has changed over time as definitions of genes, and methods of detecting them have been refined. Initial theoretical predictions of the number of human genes in the 1960s and 1970s were based on mutation load estimates and the numbers of mRNAs and these estimates tended to be about 30,000 protein-coding genes. During the 1990s there were guesstimates of up to 100,000 genes and early data on detection of mRNAs (expressed sequence tags) suggested more than the traditional value of 30,000 genes that had been reported in the textbooks during the 1980s.
  
  The initial draft sequences of the human genome confirmed the earlier predictions of about 30,000 protein-coding genes however that estimate has fallen to about 19,000 with the ongoing GENCODE annotation project. The number of noncoding genes is not known with certainty but the latest estimates from Ensembl suggest 26,000 noncoding genes.