Workshops

The 3 billion base pairs of the human genome represent a storage devise encoding information for hundreds of thousands of processes that can go on within and outside of a human cell. This information is revealed in the RNAs that are transcribed and processed and in the interactions of DNA with the protein and RNA products encoded within it. Part of the results stemming from the efforts to catalogue and analyze the RNA products made by human cells in the ENCODE and modENCODE projects have shed light on both the functional content and how this information is stored. In human cells, a total of ~161,000 transcripts present within ~50,000 genic regions represent our current best manually-curated annotation (Gencode) of the transcriptome. The results from the ENCODE project point to considerable supplementation of these data. Analyses of these data have resulted in important and often under appreciated lessons such as: (i) most gene regions produce multiple functional transcripts, (ii) low copy number transcripts are standard profiles for most genes in a cell, (iii) the fate of most long transcripts is likely to be processed into stable, sometimes capped short RNAs and (iv) a large and specific fraction of human RNAs are selectively enriched in sub-cellular compartments in a cell thus increasing their relative copy number. These and other lessons drawn from the landscape of both coding and non-coding RNAs present in human have been used to assist in understanding and organizing what is often seen as dauntingly complex genomes.