In 2003 the ENCODE project was launched (http://www.genome.gov/10005107) with the ambitious goal to identify all functional elements in the human genome. Recently the investigators completed and published (11) results of the pilot phase of the project (for a series of resulting articles see Genome Research vol. 17 issue 6 at http://www.genome.org/content/vol17/issue6/) and the NHGRI funded new awards to scale the project to the genome level and to perform additional pilot studies. The encode data is incorporated in the UCSC genome browser together with multiple other tracks of information including the HapMap data track, providing researchers with a valuable and continuously improving tool for genome-wide or targeted genetic analyses.
