Navigating the dynamic landscape of long noncoding RNA and protein-coding gene annotations in GENCODE

Background Our understanding of the transcriptional potential of the genome and its functional consequences has undergone a significant change in the last decade. This has been largely contributed by the improvements in technology which could annotate and in many cases functionally characterize a number of novel gene loci in the human genome. Keeping pace with advancements in this dynamic environment and being able to systematically annotate a compendium of genes and transcripts is indeed a formidable task. Of the many databases which attempted to systematically annotate the genome, GENCODE has emerged as one of the largest and popular compendium for human genome annotations.