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FANTOM (Functional ANnoTation Of the Mammalian genome) is an international research consortium led by RIKEN focused on functional annotation of mammalian genomes and characterization of transcriptional regulatory networks. In FANTOM5 the consortium, consisting of over 500 international members from 20 countries, has generated maps of human regulatory elements and transcriptional regulatory network models. To achieve this they use CAGE (Cap Analysis of Gene Expression) sequencing on RNA samples from every major human organ, multiple primary cell types, over 200 cancer cell lines, 30 time courses of cellular differentiation, and mouse developmental time courses.
This collection brings together research articles, analyses, resource papers and letters from FANTOM5, as well as descriptions of the data generated by the project, all of which have been published by Nature Research.
A catalogue of human long non-coding RNA genes and their expression profiles across samples from major human primary cell types, tissues and cell lines.
Owen Rackham, Jose Polo, Julian Gough and colleagues present a method, Mogrify, for predicting sets of transcription factors that can induce transdifferentiation between cell types. They show that Mogrify is able to predict known factors for published cell conversions and experimentally validate factors for two new conversions.
Hilary Finucane, Brendan Bulik-Sullivan, Benjamin Neale, Alkes Price and colleagues introduce a new method, called stratified LD score regression, for partitioning heritability by functional category using genome-wide association study summary statistics. They observe a substantial enrichment of heritability in conserved regions and illustrate how this approach can provide insights into the biological basis of disease and direction for functional follow-up.
Cell-to-cell communication relies upon interactions between secreted ligands and cell surface receptors. Here, Ramilowski et al.present a draft cell-to-cell communication network based on expression of ligand-receptor pairs in 144 different human cell types.
Body plan complexity is associated with the number of different cell types, yet the processes that create this diversity are unclear. Here the authors use transcriptomics to test the hypothesis that unlike cancer cells, novel normal cell types arise through sub-specialization of an ancestral cell type.
Piero Carninci and colleagues report the discovery of a large class of noncoding RNAs, non-annotated stem cell transcripts (NASTs), which are implicated in the regulation of stem cell properties. The authors identify 8,873 mouse and 3,042 human NASTs and functionally validate 4 as having an important role in the maintenance of pluripotency.
A study from the FANTOM consortium using single-molecule cDNA sequencing of transcription start sites and their usage in human and mouse primary cells, cell lines and tissues reveals insights into the specificity and diversity of transcription patterns across different mammalian cell types.
The FANTOM Consortium and the RIKEN PMI and CLST (DGT)
Using the FANTOM5 CAGE expression atlas, the authors show that bidirectional capped RNAs are a signature feature of active enhancers and identify over 40,000 enhancer candidates from over 800 human cell and tissue samples across the whole human body.