She said the judges will likely ask highly technical questions on Monday, to determine how much human ingenuity is required to cleave a gene, and whether the protein sequences named in the Myriad patents are truly works of nature.

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Scientists have known for years that many genes make more than one protein by taking advantage of small DNA sequences within them called exons.

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They looked at the Pfam database, a repository of the amino-acid sequences of 260, 000 protein domains, to find out how easily, using the 30% figure as a guide, these could be clustered into groups that were single units from an analytical standpoint.

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Judging from the winners' models, reliable extrapolations could be made from one protein to another so long as the two shared at least 30% of their amino-acid sequences.

ECONOMIST: Structural genomics