If you don’t want to analyse your variants on external servers or have more than 1000 or so to annotate, you probably want to use the VEP script. Setting it up might not always be straightforward as there are dependencies you need, but the installation script takes away a lot of the trouble.
Author: Emily (Outreach)
What’s coming in Ensembl 94 / Ensembl Genomes 41
We’re planning to release the next Ensembl and Ensembl Genomes in September.
We’ve got some exciting new genomes, including Emmer wheat, lots of fish and fungi. We’ve also got GENCODE updates for human and mouse, and new transcription factor binding motifs.Continue reading
Cool stuff the VEP can do: custom annotation
Trixie the Triceratops
Ensembl produce high quality gene annotation for a number of species, but getting it to the high quality we expect takes time. This means there are many species and strains where we don’t have annotation yet. If you’re working with a species without Ensembl annotation (like Trixie the Triceratops here) or even a specific strain that we don’t have, you can still make use of VEP for predicting the effect of variants on genes and transcripts, using your own annotation. All you need is a GFF or GTF of the transcripts, and a FASTA file of the genome.
Free online course – learn to use the Ensembl browser
This September, we’re excited to announce the third iteration of our free webinar-based browser course. While our in-person workshops are the best way to learn about Ensembl, we know that not everyone can attend or organise one. If that’s you, then our webinar course is perfect for you.
More Ensembl training options available
You might know that we offer training courses on using the Ensembl browser, but did you know that we also offer Ensembl REST API and Ensembl Train the Trainer courses? We can come to you to deliver any of these courses at your institute and we don’t charge any fees. If you’re in a low-middle income country, we don’t even charge you for expenses.
DANIO-CODE is out – how can you work with it in Ensembl?
Functional genomics data from DANIO-CODE has been released to the public. This international effort, similar to ENCODE in human and mouse, seeks to characterise the functional elements in the zebrafish (Danio rerio) genome. Announced on Saturday at the International Zebrafish Conference, the DANIO-CODE dataset exists as a track hub, which can be viewed in Ensembl.
Cool stuff the VEP can do: normalisation
One of the biggest headaches when working with insertions and deletions is how many different ways you can represent the same variant. If you’re looking to find out if there’s already known allele frequencies or phenotypes at a locus, you want to make sure that you find the right one. The VEP can take that headache away through normalisation of variants.
GSOC with Ensembl: introducing our students
For the third year in a row, we’re lucky to have student developers working with us as part of Google Summer of Code. We’ve got three GSOC-ers this year, working on some really exciting projects: Zeyu Tony Yang, working on primary genome analysis, Nabil Ibtehaz, working on transcript-level orthology and Somesh Chaturvedi, working on retrieving reference sequences with APIs.
GSOC is a project set up by Google that places students in open source projects to take on a short independent coding project, and pays them for it. We have to pass rigorous selection criteria to be allowed to offer projects on GSOC, and the students have to be selected by both Google and us to take part. It means the GSOC-ers are the Top Gun of student developers. We think this is a really great opportunity, both for open source projects like us, who get a fresh pair of eyes to take a look at something that we’ve maybe put on the back-burner, and for the students, who get experience working on a real-world coding project during their university summer break.
Gene Variant Image retirement for human, e93
As of Ensembl release 93, which is due at the end of the month, the Gene Variant Image view will be retired for human. We have elected to retire this page because we feel that the density of known genetic variation is too great for this view to be informative in its current form.
Training in low-middle income countries
Map of low-middle income countries, according to the OECD
We’re excited to announce that we have received a grant from the Wellcome Trust to deliver Ensembl training in low-middle income countries at no charge.Continue reading