Ensembl and EnsemblGenomes

Ensembl and Ensembl Genomes will be presented by Helen Sparrow, Ensembl Outreach Officer. The talk will include an introduction to Ensembl browsers, key views in browsing genomes, and tools for accessing genomic data and analysing your own, including BioMart and the VEP.

Ensembl (www.ensembl.org) provides an interface and an infrastructure for accessing genomic information covering over 70 vertebrate species, including cow, pig, sheep, and chicken. Its sister project, Ensembl Genomes (http://www.ensemblgenomes.org), consists of five sub-portals (bacteria, protists, fungi, plants, and invertebrate metazoa) which contain data for over 700 eukaryotic (including wheat, barley, tomato and the 12 OGE species) and almost 40,000 prokaryotic genomes.

All species in Ensembl and Ensembl Genomes have gene annotation (based on biological evidence) and comparative genomics analyses within the taxa (excluding bacteria). For many of these genomes, we also provide annotation of sequence variants, such as SNPs and CNVs. Access to these data are via our browser websites, BioMart (for protists, fungi, plants, and animals), FTP, Perl APIs, REST API, and MySQL queries. The Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) is a powerful tool that allows analysis of your own sequence variants and is available for all species in Ensembl and Ensembl Genomes and can even be used for species not in Ensembl. Highlights of the past year include; pre-release of new bread wheat genome, updated phenotype data for sheep, chicken, pig, horse and cow, pairwise alignments for more than 50 plant genomes, and new variation data for wheat and barley.