Ancora

Welcome to Ancora !

This site is devoted to the study of highly conserved noncoding elements (HCNEs) in metazoan genomes. We identify HCNEs as non-exonic regions of high similarity between genome sequences from distantly related organisms, such as human and fish, and provide tools for studying the distribution of HCNEs along chromosomes.

Major peaks of HCNE density along chromosomes most often coincide with developmental regulatory genes. Our aim with this site is to aid discovery of developmental regulatory genes, their regulatory domains and their fundamental regulatory elements.

The name Ancora is an acronym for Atlas of Noncoding Conserved Regions in Animals. Ancora is also a latin word that means anchor, reflecting the ability of HCNEs to constrain genome evolution and anchor genome alignments.

Ancora is maintained by Boris Lenhard's research group at MRC Clinical Sciences Centre. Questions and comments can be sent to ge.tan09 at imperial.ac.uk

Please select one of the links on the right to learn more.

Browse HCNEs on the genome of:


Browse HCNEs in external genome browsers


Download HCNE data


Methods and references

[Link to the previous version of Ancora]