Ensembl and Ensembl Genomes

The EMBL-EBI (European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute) provides freely available data from life science experiments and tools for data analysis. It performs research in computational biology, and offers user-training programme in academia and industry. In this workshop, we will give an overview to the EMBL-EBI and focus on: 1) Ensembl, one of the most comprehensive and integrated resources of data for animal genomes, which can be accessed via the web (www.ensembl.org), through our tools (e.g. BioMart and VEP, the Variant Effect Predictor) and also programmatically. We fully support the gene annotation (based on biological evidence) and comparative genomics analyses for more than 60 species including cow, pig, sheep, and chicken, in addition to annotating sequence variants for more than 20 animal genomes. 2) Ensembl Genomes, Ensembl sister project, provides annotation of more than >25,000 genomes from our five portals (bacteria, protists, fungi, plants, and metazoa), including 39 plant genomes. 3) EVA, the European Variation Archive offers a comprehensive repository of all variation data from any species and accepts submission of new variation data from the scientific community. Currently more than 40% of all data in EVA is from non-human species, mostly plant and livestock. We aim to provide a resource to the plant and animal community that can accession, archive and provide views of genetic variation data more quickly and in a more granular manner than any other resource of this nature. Variants stored at EVA are annotated using a variety of standardized methods, including Ensembl’s Variant Effect Predictor.