NHGRIResearchers at Japan’s RIKEN institute, in collaboration with scientists worldwide, have produced two atlases of genetic regulatory elements throughout the human genome, as reported in a pair of papers published today (March 26) in Nature. The first paper presents an atlas of transcription start sites, where RNA polymerase begins to transcribe DNA into RNA; the second maps active enhancers, non-promoter stretches of DNA that upregulate the transcription of certain genes. Sixteen additional papers related to this work—results from the fifth edition of the Functional Annotation of the Mammalian Genome (FANTOM) project—are also today being published in other journals, including Blood and BMC Genomics.
“Both papers are very significant,” said biochemist Wei Wang from the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the work. “This will be a very valuable resource for the community.”
“We made an encyclopedia of the definition of the normal cell: 185,000 promoters, 44,000 enhancers, and the majority of them are tissue-specific,” said the RIKEN Omics Science Center’s Yoshihide Hayashizaki, who led the promoter annotation project.
“This is a very broad survey of transcriptional activity in diverse cell types, [making it] a very valuable resource, and currently, quite unique,” said Zhiping Weng from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, who was not involved in the work. Weng noted that the only comparable resource is the Genotype-Tissue Expression Program (GTEX), which when compared ...
