In 2001, the Human Genome Project produced a near-complete readout of the human species’ DNA. But researchers had little idea about how those As, Gs, Cs, and Ts were used, controlled, or organized, much less how they code for a living, breathing human.
That knowledge gap has just got a little smaller. A massive international project called ENCODE, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, has cataloged every nucleotide within the genome that does something—which, it turns out, is significantly more than the 1.5 percent of the genome contains actual instructions for making proteins. The research, a 10-year effort by an international team of 442 scientists, shows that the rest of the genome—the non-coding majority—is still rife with “functional elements.”
“The genome is no longer an empty vastness,” said Shyam Prabhakar from the Genome Institute of Singapore, who was not involved in the study. “It is densely packed with peaks and wiggles ...
