ENCODE Project

The ENCODE, or Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, Project's objective is to aid the biology and medical community by helping them interpret the human genome. It uses several different types of technology to identify all of the functional elements within the human genome. The main purpose is to make all of this information available to public databases for widespread use. This project was launched by the National Human Genome Research Institute to identify all of the regions within the genome that codes for a defined product or a biochemical signature. These signatures can mark important sequences within the genome, such as those for silencers, enhancers, and promoters. The main focus currently is to annotate genes and their RNA transcripts and also regulatory regions for transcription. Click here to access the article that I got my information from. Overall, this project is an important development within bioinformatics and it will be interesting to see how large the database grows.