ENCODE1 published the results of a pilot project in 2007 (Birney et al., 2007). They looked at 1% (30Mb) of the genome with a view to establishing their techniques and dealing with large amounts of data from many different groups. The goal was to "provide a more biologically informative representation of the human genome by using high-throughput methods to identify and catalogue the functional elements encoded."
The most striking result of this preliminary study was the confirmation of pervasive transcription. Here's what the ENCODE Consortium leaders said in the abstract,Together, our results advance the collective knowledge about human genome function in several major areas. First, our studies provide convincing evidence that the genome is pervasively transcribed, such that the majority of its bases can be found in primary transcripts, including non-protein-coding transcripts, and those that extensively overlap with one another.ENCODE concluded that 93% of the genome is transcribed in one tissue or another. There are two possible explanations that account for pervasive transcription.