What is GENCODE?

GENCODE is a sub-project of the ENCylcopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project. The aim of GENCODE is to annotate all evidence-based gene features (genes, transcripts, coding sequences, etc) in the entire human and mouse genomes at a high accuracy. The result will be a set of annotations including all protein-coding loci with alternatively transcribed variants, non-coding loci with transcript evidence and pseudogenes. The process to create this annotation involves manual curation, different computational analysis and targeted experimental approaches. Putative loci can be verified by wet-lab experiments and computational predictions are analysed manually. The Ensembl human and mouse gene sets are a merge of Havana's manual annotation with Ensembl's automatic annotation. It is this merged gene set that we provide to GENCODE. The default human and mouse gene sets in the Ensembl browser is therefore also the current version of GENCODE. More information can be found at the GENCODE website.


If you have any other questions about Ensembl, please do not hesitate to contact our HelpDesk. You may also like to subscribe to the developers' mailing list.