BioMed Central Blog

A special series of companion papers from the FANTOM4 consortium

Genome Biology and BMC Bioinformatics have published the first articles in a new cross-journal article series reporting results from FANTOM4, the latest research project from the FANTOM consortium.

FANTOM (Functional Annotation of Mouse) is an international collaborative research project initiated and organized by the RIKEN Omics Science Center in Yokohama, Japan. Previous work from the FANTOM consortium has focused on identifying the transcribed components of mammalian cells. FANTOM4 builds on this work, using novel methods to define how these cellular components are regulated and work together as a biological network in the acute myeloid leukemia cell line THP-1.

Among the first FANTOM4 papers to be published in Genome Biology is a description of a suite of computer programs from Josee Dostie and colleagues which allow chromatin conformation signatures to be identified. In the same journal, Alistair Forrest and colleagues describe EdgeExpressDB, a new database and associated tools for interpreting biological networks and comparing large high-throughput expression datasets. Further work published in BMC Bioinformatics by John Quackenbush and colleagues outlines two new data-driven normalization strategies for high-throughput real-time quantitative PCR data. Additional research articles in this article series will be published over coming months.

The FANTOM4 papers, including three additional companion articles just published in Nature Genetics, are put in context by Phil Kapranov’s minireview, which is also published in the latest issue of Genome Biology.

Posted by Ruth Rowland at 21:34    Comments (0)