What is "gencode"

GENCODE is a scientific project in genome research and part of the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) scale-up project.

The GENCODE consortium was initially formed as part of the pilot phase of the ENCODE project to identify and map all protein-coding genes within the ENCODE regions (approx. 1% of Human genome). Given the initial success of the project, GENCODE now aims to build an “Encyclopedia of genes and genes variants” by identifying all gene features in the human and mouse genome using a combination of computational analysis, manual annotation, and experimental validation, and annotating all evidence-based gene features in the entire human genome at a high accuracy.

The result will be a set of annotations including all protein-coding loci with alternatively transcribed variants, non-coding loci with transcript evidence, and pseudogenes.