Genomics Special Issue on 10 Years of FAANG

This year marks a decade of progress for the international initiative advancing the Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes (FAANG). FAANG is a global initiative including more that 560 scientific contributors with the shared goal of discovering basic functional knowledge of genome function to decipher the genotype-to-phenotype (G2P) link in domestic animals (https://faang.org/) [1]. To mark this milestone, Genomics has dedicated a special issue currently comprising nine original articles that expand the foundations of domestic animal genomics. The first stages of FAANG focused on foundational data generation to characterise the expressed and regulatory regions of farmed animal genomes at the bulk tissue level in individual reference animals [2]. This approach was very successful providing resources that now underpin animal science research globally, in the form of highly annotated reference genomes for the main domestic animal species. Since the original FAANG white paper was published in 2015 [1], exciting new opportunities have arisen adding new dimensions to understanding the genotype-to-phenotype link in domestic animals. These are outlined in the FAANG to Fork research strategy [3] and include, for example, capturing functional genomic diversity at scale across tissues, breeds and populations, analysing gene expression and regulation at single cell resolution, and measuring the effect that husbandry decisions such as diet has on the genome. The articles in this special issue capture many of these new developments and build on the powerful foundation provided by the last decade of research within the FAANG initiative. The topics covered include the annotation and characterisation of genome function and regulatory elements at bulk and single cell resolution, through the integration and comparative analysis of genomic, transcriptomic and epigenetic data from domestic animals.