Welcome message from the Editor-in-Chief

Abstract

On behalf of the Editorial Team and Informa Healthcare, the publishers, it gives me great pleasure to introduce the Journal of Human Transcriptome (JHT). The JHT is an onlineonly, Open Access publishing platform to propagate the rapidly expanding research on many aspects of human genome regulation. This includes, just to mention a few, regulation of the expression of protein-coding genes and non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) as well as epigenetic mechanisms and RNA editing. The idea of the journal came from recognizing the need to consolidate and streamline the dissemination of research on unique features of the human genome, for example, in the emerging field of long ncRNAs, with many of them being human specific. A further motivation to establish the JHT was to provide a publishing space for communicating advances in high-throughput technologies, such as next-generation sequencing and microarrays, that will enable a more comprehensive exploration of genomic complexity in humans. Finally, clinical and disease context for transcriptome investigation comprises an important part of the JHT’s publishing scope. Indeed, there is an increasing recognition in the literature that the molecular pathomechanisms of many complex diseases are not only determined by mutations in the protein-coding regions of causative genes but they also result from the perturbation of alternative splicing or interactions of protein-coding transcripts with antisense RNAs. Recent advances in the studies of pervasive transcription also suggest that tissueand cell-type-specific ncRNAs play an important role in the etiologies of complex disorders.