New insights into how different tissues establish their biological and functional identities
The cell is an immensely complex biological system involving a multitude of components that work together to drive the cellular machine. Identifying how all of the components fit together in any given cell type is a challenge in itself—integrating the pieces into a functional whole across a wide variety of cell types is an undertaking on a different scale entirely. Yet this is the ambitious goal of the international FANTOM5 consortium, led by Alistair Forrest, Piero Carninci and colleagues from the RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies and Yoshihide Hayashizaki from the RIKEN Preventive Medicine & Diagnosis Innovation Program, which has made important progress in assembling a functional blueprint for the myriad genomic elements that control gene expression across hundreds of different mammalian cell types.