WIKIMEDIA, RAMAIn 2012, a large research consortium released the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), a decade-long project to map functional elements in the human genome, moving beyond the 1.5 percent of the sequence that constitutes protein-coding genes. This week, researchers announced the completion of the Mouse ENCODE project with a series of papers in Nature, Science, and PNAS.
Using a series of high-throughput assays similar to those used to study the human regulatory landscape, the researchers identified mouse-specific patterns of transcription factor binding, gene expression, and DNA replication. This wealth of data will serve as a guide to researchers who use mouse models to study diseases, brain functions, and other basic biology.
One of the Mouse ENCODE papers, published in Nature, examined the genome-wide binding sites of 34 transcription factors in three different cell types from both mice and humans. In general, the transcription factors bound to similar regions of the genome and showed comparable responses to chromatin states and DNA methylation. The team’s analysis also exposed subtle differences: for instance, binding to gene promoters was more conserved between the species than binding ...
