NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Researchers in Japan have launched the fifth phase of the Functional Annotation of the Mammalian Genome project to globally map transcription initiation in every human cell type.
Called FANTOM5, this next phase seeks to generate transcriptional regulatory models to define all human cell types. Started in 2000, FANTOM has generated an encyclopedia of mouse full-length cDNAs, which remain the largest collection of mammalian full-length cDNAs, according to a statement from Piero Carninci from the Riken Omics Science Center, which participated in the project.
In FANTOM4, a technique called CAGE, developed by Carninci to generate sequence tags from the 5' ends of capped RNAs, was applied to an acute myeloid leukemia cell line undergoing monocytic differentiation, generating a transcriptional regulatory model which identified the key transcription factors involved in monocytic differentiation.
Riken noted that it is using Helicos BioSciences' Heliscope single-molecule sequencer for conducting the research.