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ENCODE confirmed more recent theories that the bulk of this junk is actually littered with switches that determine how the genes work and act as a massive control panel. Our genome is simply alive with switches: millions of places that determine whether a gene is switched on or off, said lead analysis coordinator Ewan Birney of the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute. We found a much bigger part of the genome a surprising amount, in fact is involved in controlling when and where proteins are produced, than in simply manufacturing the building blocks. Perhaps most importantly, the database has been made available to the scientific community and the general public as an open resource in order to facilitate research. ENCODE gives us a set of very valuable leads to follow to discover key mechanisms at play in health and disease, said Ian Dunham of the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, who played a key role in coordinating the analysis. Those can be exploited to create entirely new medicines, or to repurpose existing treatments. The project combined the efforts of 442 scientists in 32 labs in the United States, Britain, Spain, Switzerland, Singapore and Japan. The researchers used about 300 years worth of computer time to study 147 tissue types and identified over four million different regulatory regions where proteins interact with the DNA. AFP/Relaxnews