FANTOM is an international research consortium established by Dr. Hayashizaki and his colleagues in 2000 to assign functional annotations to the full-length cDNAs that were collected during the Mouse Encyclopedia Project at RIKEN. FANTOM has since developed and expanded over time to encompass the fields of transcriptome analysis. The object of the project is moving steadily up the layers in the system of life, progressing thus from an understanding of the 'elements' - the transcripts - to an understanding of the 'system' - the transcriptional regulatory network, in other words the 'system' of an individual life form. In FANTOM5, we have systematically investigated exactly what are the sets of genes used in virtually all cell types across the human body, and the genomic regions which determine where the genes are read from. We aim to use this information to build transcriptional regulatory models for every primary cell type that makes up a human. The resource provides raw and processed data obtained in the FANTOM5 project.
The FANTOM5 resources provides a comprehensive map of gene activity across the human body, and provides a holistic view of the complex networks that regulate gene expression across the wide variety of cell types that make up a human being. The resource can be a foundamental tool to define normal cells in human bodies. These findings will help in the identification of genes involved in disease and the development of personalized and regenerative medicine.