A user's guide to the Encyclopedia of DNA elements (ENCODE)

The mission of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) Project is to enable the scientific and medical communities to interpret the human genome sequence and apply it to understand human biology and improve health. The ENCODE Consortium is integrating multiple technologies and approaches in a collective effort to discover and define the functional elements encoded in the human genome, including genes, transcripts, and transcriptional regulatory regions, together with their attendant chromatin states and DNA methylation patterns. In the process, standards to ensure high-quality data have been implemented, and novel algorithms have been developed to facilitate analysis. Data and derived results are made available through a freely accessible database. Here we provide an overview of the project and the resources it is generating and illustrate the application of ENCODE data to interpret the human genome

Constructing the metropolitan homeland: the literatures of the white settler societies of New Zealand and Australia

This article examines the responses articulated in white settler writing from New Zealand and Australia to the location and status of these nations as postcolonial diasporas. Beginning with the early colonial sense of estrangement from and idealisation of the metropolitan homeland of Great Britain it traces a pattern of literary engagement with the European source of ethnic origin through to the present day. The article notes changing attitudes towards home and homelands due to the greater fluidity and complexity of migratory and travel paths as the binaries of home and abroad, empire and colony, metropolitan centre and provincial periphery begin to break down towards the end of the twentieth centur