Anonymous Nature Editors Respond to ENCODE Criticism

There are now been four papers in the scientific literature criticizing the way ENCODE leaders hyped their data by claiming that most of our genome is functional [see Ford Doolittle's Critique of ENCODE ]. There have been dozens of blog postings on the same topic.

The worst of the papers were published by Nature—this includes the abominable summary that should never have made it past peer review (Encode Consortium, 2012).

The lead editor on the ENCODE story was Brendan Maher and he promoted the idea that the ENCODE results showed that most of our genome has a function [ENCODE: The human encyclopaedia]

The consortium has assigned some sort of function to roughly 80% of the genome, including more than 70,000 ‘promoter’ regions — the sites, just upstream of genes, where proteins bind to control gene expression — and nearly 400,000 ‘enhancer’ regions that regulate expression of distant genes.

Read more »