Most efforts to understand genes in health and disease over the last decades have focused on protein-coding transcripts, which comprise just 2% of the human genome. Given that the number of protein-coding genes in lower and higher organisms are comparable, the huge differences in genome sizes are due to non-coding parts. As a result, the non-coding genome is very likely to contribute to the complex activities and diseases present in higher organisms. We are aiming to better identify and characterize the functional non-coding genome by designing, engineering and synthesizing genomic pieces. Further understanding the function and mechanisms of non-coding regulatory elements will also help better re-design synthetic genomes.
