Ten years after the publication of the draft human genome sequence in the journals Nature and Science, an international research consortium, totalling over 440 scientists, have published details of how human cells use the genome. Entitled “ENCODE” – the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, the painstaking work of extracting useful knowledge from the genome’s approximate 3 billion nucleotides, examined how 147 different cell types, including retinal pigment epithelia, use and interpret genetic information. The results of the work, published across 30 papers and 3 journals, identifies regions of transcription, transcription factor association, chromatin structure and histone modification, key regulatory features controlling how, when and where genes are turned on and off.