ENCODE delivers its results

The ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) consortium funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute has published its considerable wealth of results across several journals in the next key phase following the decoding of the human genome. The project was initiated to identify all of the functional elements within the human genome and they found that 80% of the genome performs specific functions, a far greater proportion than was initially thought. Many areas of the genome previously assigned the dismissive term "junk DNA" have now been functionally reassigned.

The results are so extensive that they have been published across three journals and the common topics across the papers, named threads, have been linked on the Nature ENCODE website to allow readers to follow them through. These papers in Nature, Genome Research and Genome Biology were supplemented by six review articles in the Journal of Biological Chemistry as well as related papers in Science, Cell and other journals.