The broad coverage of ENCODE annotations enhances our understanding of common diseases with a genetic component, rare genetic diseases, and cancer, as shown by our ability to link otherwise anonymous associations to a functional element. ENCODE and similar studies provide a first step towards interpreting the rest of the genome— beyond protein-coding genes—thereby augmenting common disease genetic studies with testable hypotheses. Such information justifies performing whole-genome sequencing (rather than exome only, 1.2% of the genome) on rare diseases and investigating somatic variants in non-coding functional elements, for instance, in cancer. Furthermore since GWAS analyses typically associate disease to SNPs in large regions, comparison to ENCODE non-coding functional elements can help pinpoint putative causal variants in addition to refinement of location by fine-mapping techniques78. Combining ENCODE data with allele-specific information derived from individual genome sequences, provides specific insight on the impact of a genetic variant. Indeed, we believe a significant goal would be to use functional data such as that derived from this project to assign every genomic variant to its possible impact on human phenotypes.
