The ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) Project

The Myers Lab at HudsonAlpha is one of seven production groups for The ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) Project, funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute. The goal of ENCODE is to build a comprehensive parts list of functional elements in the human genome, including elements that act at the protein and RNA levels, and regulatory elements that control cells and circumstances in which a gene is active. The Myers Lab has been a member of the ENCODE Consortium since it was launched in 2003, first participating in the pilot project aimed at annotating one percent of the human genome and then joining the full genome effort in 2007. In collaboration with Dr. Barbara Wold and her lab at Caltech, we developed or adapted protocols for ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, and DNA methylation. More recently, the Myers and Wold Labs have joined forces in the ENCODE project with Dr. Eric Mendenhall of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Dr. Ross Hardison of Penn State, Dr. Ali Mortazavi of the University of California, Irvine and Tim Reddy of Duke University. We have generated hundreds of genome-wide datasets that measure transcription factor binding sites in the human genome, identify RNA transcripts in mouse and human cells and identify DNA methylation sites in human cells. All of our data are publicly available and can be searched, downloaded and browsed on the ENCODE website.

The ENCODE data, protocols, and analysis have been produced by many dedicated research assistants, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, computational biologists and staff scientists. For questions regarding the Myers Lab ENCODE data, please contact the Myers Lab.