Pilot projects for the human ENCODE project.. Pilot ENCODE Project

The pilot phase of the ENCODE project tested, compared, and developed methods to identify functional elements for approximately 1% (30Mb) of the human genome. Half of the sequence selected corresponded to known genes and/or sequence regions with known sequence elements. The remaining regions were selected using a random-sampling strategy based on gene density and observed conservation blocks outside of gene exon definitions. A component of the ENCODE pilot project included the generation of sequence data from a number of different genomes in order to analyze the human genome through comparative analyses. The Pilot ENCODE Project collaboration established close interactions between computational and experimental scientists to develop and evaluate different methods for annotating functional elements of the human genome.