Browsing Genes and Genomes with Ensembl and Ensembl Genomes

The Ensembl project is a joint effort of the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. It provides one of the most comprehensive and integrated resources of genomic data, which can be accessed via the web (www.ensembl.org) and through BioMart, FTP, Perl APIs, REST API, and MySQL queries. In our current release (version 75, February 2014), we fully support the gene annotation (based on biological evidence) and the comparative genomics analyses for more than 60 species, including cow, pig, sheep, and chicken. For many of these genomes, we also provide annotation of sequence variants, such as SNPs and CNVs. Highlights of the past 12 months include new species (e.g. sheep), new assemblies (e.g. chicken) and the new web interface of our Variant Effect Predictor, the VEP, a tool for analyses of sequence variants (http://www.ensembl.org/vep), which is available for all Ensembl species.

Ensembl Genomes (http://www.ensemblgenomes.org) consists of five sub-portals (bacteria, protists, fungi, plants, and invertebrate metazoa) designed to complement the Ensembl project. The current release (Ensembl Genomes 22) contains data for over 100 eukaryote and over 11,000 prokaryote species. Recent developments include the new assembly of the wheat genome, five new rice genomes, and the assembly converter tool. The VEP is also available in Ensembl Genomes.

In this talk, I will demo some of the views of the Ensembl and Ensembl Genomes Browsers, the new web interface to the Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) tool, and how to visualise your own data in our browsers.