The unprecedented number of functional elements identified in this study provides a valuable resource to the scientific community as well as significantly enhances our understanding of the human genome. Our analyses have revealed many novel aspects of gene expression and regulation as well as the organization of such information, as illustrated by the accompanying papers (see http://www.encodeproject.org/ENCODE/pubs.html for collected ENCODE publications). However, there are still many specific details, particularly about the mechanistic processes which generate these elements and how and where they function, that require additional experiments to elucidate.
