Spoiler alert, materials do not have a genome. Yet for the past decade, and into the next decade, in the USA there has been a presidential and inter-agency funding initiative called the 'Materials Genome Initiative (MGI)'. This initiative has nothing to do with real genomes, materials or otherwise. However, in this talk I, somewhat whimsically, explore some ideas about what a materials gene could be, and how it could be used to further our understanding of materials structure and properties. The result is a slightly non-conventional, less crystal-centric, view of material structure that we believe can, will, and is, resulting in novel materials insights. I will lay out some mathematical background for candidate materials gene-codings and will discuss how these fit into our new world view, populated as it is with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. I will also describe some of our efforts to apply ML to the nanostructure inverse problem: given a 1D measured PDF, what is the 3D arrangement of atoms that gave rise to it. Preliminary results seem to be very promising.