It involved 32 institutes, 442 consortium members, and 1649 experiments-but what does the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) add up to? To understand the significance of the results published by the ENCODE consortium last week, some context is needed. The Human Genome Project showed that the proportion of the genome that coded directly for proteins was surprisingly small. If this was the book of life, it was a book with, it seemed, a surfeit of irrelevant material. A decade on, ENCODE has assigned biochemical functions to 80% of the human genome. Far from being "junk", the DNA between protein-encoding genes consists of myriad elements that determine gene expression, whether by switching transcription on or off, or by regulating the degree of transcription and consequently the concentrations and function of all proteins.
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