The GENCODE Project: Encyclopædia of genes and gene variants
Introduction
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The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) launched a public research consortium named ENCODE, the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements, in September 2003, to carry out a project to identify all functional elements in the human genome sequence. After a successful pilot phase on 1% of the genome, the scale-up to the entire genome is now underway. The WT Sanger Institute was awarded a grant to carry out a scale-up of the GENCODE project for integrated annotation of gene features. You can find a list of all ENCODE participants and projects here.
Details
The aim of GENCODE as a sub-project of the ENCODE scale-up project is to annotate all evidence-based gene features in the entire human genome at a high accuracy. The result will be a set of annotations including all protein-coding loci with alternatively transcribed variants, non-coding loci with transcript evidence, and pseudogenes. The process to create this annotation involves manual curation, different computational analysis and targeted experimental approaches. Putative loci can be verified by wet-lab experiments and computational predictions will be analysed manually.
The international team working in the GENCODE project is headed by Tim Hubbard at the WT Sanger Institute.
