Genome Biology, one of BioMed Central's flagship journals, has published six articles from the ENCODE consortium project. A further article is published in BMC Genetics. These are from a series of over 30 articles published in a multi-publisher collaboration between BioMed Central, Nature and Genome Research. The articles seek to address important questions relating to regulatory elements, specifically how they are defined and how they correlate with gene expression.
The completion of the human genome project in 2003, observed to be an important milestone, left many biologists wondering what the sequence might actually mean. Consequently, the focus of human genomics that year began the transition from generating sequence - to annotating the functional elements, hidden within the human genome's 3.2 billion As, Cs, Gs and Ts. With this goal in mind the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) consortium was formed.
Some combinations of the nucleotides would together constitute the exons and introns that make up genes, while some would form regulatory elements. ENCODE set out to comprehensively annotate these elements in as much functional detail as possible which can now be found in the ENCODE explorer, a novel micro-site allowing seamless navigation between articles. Following nearly 10 years of data generation, the project's findings have now been published.
The GENCODE pseudogene resource, one of the Genome Biology papers, describes genes that have suffered a lethal number of mutations but whose 'fossil' traces are still apparent in the genome. The article shows that some of these pseudogenes may still be functional, in some cases having been partially resurrected from gene death.
BioMed Central has been publishing peer reviewed, open access journals for 12 years and now has a portfolio of 270 journals in science and medicine. All of the 30 ENCODE articles will be open access - meaning these articles will be freely accessible online for all and will be available as a collection on the micro-site ENCODE explorer, which is hosted by Nature and also through an iPad App.
