As sequencing technology steadily improves and becomes cheaper a thousand dollar genome will soon become a reality. However, utilizing this genomic data efficiently is still dependent on which reference annotation is chosen to highlight its gene landscape and variation between other individuals. The GENCODE human reference set is a merge of automatic and manual annotation, thus producing the most comprehensive gene set publicly available. Its regular release cycle of every 3 mo ensures that models are continually refined and assessed based on new experimental data deposited in the public databases. In addition, users can send updates or queries concerning individual genes using the Annotrack system or via the Gencodegenes.org website to trigger investigation and updates of specific issues alongside those flagged by global quality-control (QC) checks.
