«You can make inferences, ideally, about what
role each gene segment might have,» explains the Broad Institute's Yozwiak, «and that would be useful, but making larger leaps about its phenotype in people or any other reservoir species, that's a lot harder to do.»
The
gene product's precise
role is not currently understood but it is thought to anchor regulatory complexes at the photoreceptor connecting cilium, which acts as a bridge between the inner and outer
segments of photoreceptor cells [43] as well as having functions in disk morphogenesis [42] and in the structure of the ciliary axoneme [44].