HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- Vast parts of the human genome thought to be "junk DNA" are really filled with millions of cellular "switches" helping choreograph the roles genes play in human life and disease, scientists said today.

Researchers from 32 laboratories around the world, including Huntsville's HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, announced the simultaneous publication of 30 scientific papers detailing new discoveries in the ongoing ENCODE Project, short for Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. It is funded in the United States by the National Genome Research Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health.

Scientists at HudsonAlpha, working with a group at the California Institute of Technology led by Dr. Barbara Wold, are research contributors, and Dr. Rick Myers, president and director of HudsonAlpha, was one of five researchers briefing reporters on an international conference call today.

Instead of believing that only 2 percent of the genome is controlling cells, the ENCODE project has now proved that at least 80 percent of DNA has some function in cellular creation and growth, Myers said. ENCODE collaborators have also identified 4 million of the so-called genetic switches that determine whether genes are turned off or on in the overall cellular wiring diagram.

The findings, which have been made available as they were discovered over the past five years, have already opened new areas of research into breast, prostate and other cancers, Myers said. But the mass of new data contained in the papers published today has also led to a new way of presenting scientific information. With the journal Nature in the lead, the 30 connected research papers have been mapped so scientists can follow topic "bridges" across the mass of research. The new research map can be found at nature.com/encode. The research itself has also been placed online at encodeproject.org.

"As a result of the ENCODE Project," Myers said, "thousands of researchers around the world -- in universities, medical schools, biotech companies, pharmaceutical companies, and research institutions - now have this new interpretation of our genome, freely available from the Internet, and are using it to understand a wide range of basic and biomedical problems."

HudsonAlpha used a scientific technique called "ChIP-seq" or "chromatin immunoprecipitation and sequencing" to study proteins bound to DNA.

"We often think of DNA like a bunch of spaghetti in the nucleus, but actually it's wrapped up around all kinds of different proteins. So it's more like a bunch of spaghetti wrapped around beads of thousands of various sizes and colors," explained researcher Dr. Chris Gunter. "The technique ChIP-seq enables us to pick out one specific protein and the piece of DNA it's wrapped around, everywhere it appears across the entire genome."

These "molecular tweezers" allowed HudsonAlpha scientists to then sequence each piece of DNA bound to the protein, Gunter said. "Each of these DNA sequences is then called a functional element," she said, "because we now know that they are bound by a protein and appear to be important in controlling gene expression."

"It is extremely highly organized," Myers said of the process. And much more disease than scientists previously thought is "clearly due to misregulation of the genome because of these elements," he said.