Editorial: Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes

International audienceEditorial on the Research Topic Functional Annotation of Farm Animal Genomes All fields of biology have been greatly influenced by the generation of complete and well-annotated genome assemblies. This impact is most apparent with the findings and resulting applications from the Human Genome Project (HGP), which has transformed biomedical science. The original justification for having a genome assembly was to get a complete "parts list" with the primary goal being the identification and location of all genes. However, it soon became readily apparent that genomes were much more than just sequences that code for proteins; protein-coding regions account for ∼1.5% of the human genome and similar results were obtained in analyzing the genomes of domesticated and other farmed animal species. Thus, current efforts have been focused on finding relevant functional elements, such as non-coding elements that regulate when, where, and how much specific genes and/or particular isoforms are expressed. To address the need for annotation of farm animal genomes, the Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes (FAANG) Consortium was launched in 2015. Like other research consortia, FAANG (www.faang.org) is committed to sharing data rapidly and before publication for the benefit of the whole community (www.faang.org/data-share-principle), with data and metadata (standardized details on samples, laboratory and bioinformatic protocols applied with a comprehensiveness more than current practice) being collected in the FAANG Data Portal (https://data.faang.org/home). A Research Topic call for papers was made to provide the opportunity to report on the ongoing efforts to annotate farm animal genomes and inform genomic biology. We believed that such a Research Topic would be timely as a historical marker of such efforts, as the pilot FAANG projects were being completed and a number of larger-scale projects are underway in Australia, the United States and Europe. Many groups responded to this call. The Research Topic also offered the opportunity to establish reference-settings for FAANG with respect to methods and protocols. We are pleased that 21 papers, representing eight species as well as two species-agnostic resource reports, are presented in this collection. Below, we summarize reports with complementary themes, focused on one or more of the following topics