The aim of the GENCODE Genes project (Harrow et al., 2006) is to produce a set of highly accurate annotations of evidence-based gene features on the human reference genome. This includes the identification of all protein-coding loci with associated alternative splice variants, non-coding with transcript evidence in the public databases (NCBI/EMBL/DDBJ) and pseudogenes. A high quality set of gene structures is necessary for many research studies such as comparative or evolutionary analyses, or for experimental design and interpretation of the results.

The GENCODE Genes tracks display the high-quality manual annotations merged with evidence-based automated annotations across the entire human genome. The GENCODE gene set presents a full merge between HAVANA manual annotation and Ensembl automatic annotation. Priority is given to the manually curated HAVANA annotation using predicted Ensembl annotations when there are no corresponding manual annotations. With each release, there is an increase in the number of annotations that have undergone manual curation. This annotation was carried out on the GRCh38 (hg38) genome assembly.

To view the full description, click here.