September 24, 2012, New York, NY—Dizzying amounts of data have been produced by the ENCODE project which has been extremely successful in mapping out the functional sequences of the human genome. In the field of genomics, one strives to tease out how a genome – a relatively simple strand of A, G, C, and T bases – can encode all the instructions necessary to create life in all its forms. Bing Ren, who heads up the Ludwig San Diego laboratory of gene regulation, will lead an effort to comprehensively characterize the epigenetic landscape of the mouse genome. That is to say the study of heritable changes in gene expression that are caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence. This endeavor is expected to yield critical information in order to annotate cis regulatory sequences in the genome. The results will provide a valuable reference for the human genome, and assist researchers in understanding both the shared and divergent gene regulatory programs in the two species.
Click here to read the official NIH press release.