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Ensembl is in the process of moving its site search to the open source Apache Lucene framework. This change should bring several advantages, not only to us, but to all users, the main one being added flexibility; in the short term it will have little impact on web site users, except for making life easier to those maintaining local instances.

From Ensembl release 62 (due out this spring) we will incorporate more data into the search (for example help and documentation) and start to improve how we display results. For developers, note that whilst we are not releasing the webcode for Lucene immediately, we are aiming to do so for release 62.

This powerful platform allows searching of over 3 million genes and gene symbols, over 6 million oligo probes, and over 67 million variations! Our implementation utilises software designed and developed by our colleagues at the European Bioinformatics Institute (used in the EB-eye) which has proven to be fast and flexible.

Lucene is open-source technology that has also been implemented to
provide searches of our mailing lists (i.e. announce and dev), thanks to our colleagues at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

We hope these improvements will help make browsing Ensembl a more user-friendly experience. Please give your feedback at helpdesk@ensembl.org.

by ·Comments Off on Survey Feedback – Thank You

Many thanks to the Ensembl browser users who have given us feedback in our recent survey entitled “Tell Us What You Think”! We learned some valuable points that are being addressed to improve our discoverability, functionality, and overall usability.

We heard back from scientists all over the world- the majority of you were in the UK, Netherlands, the US, and Germany. Represented fields include bioinformatics, basic research, clinical and genetics research, biotechnology and immunology. 50% of respondants work mainly with the computer, while the other half of you do at least some wet-lab biology. We even got responses from mainly wet-lab scientists (15% of respondants)- this is useful to us, as we strive to make Ensembl usable to the largest possible community.

So what did we learn? The use of BioMart and the Perl API by website-users has increased since our last survey a year and a half ago. We have more infrequent users, visiting our browser monthly or less often- though the majority of our users are Ensembl masters (frequent users). We believe that this represents the fact that an ever greater percentage of biological research involves at least some bioinformatics tools and hope this reflects a simpler, more straightforward website that does not need extensive study to use. Finally, 65% of our users take a genome-wide approach, while 20% focus on less than 10 genes.

So what did people like? Our tools are popular, especially the Variant Effect Predictor. The recent addition of sortable columns is also a hit. When you all were asked what other tools are desired, we were pleased to find that some (history) were already being implemented, while others exist, but seem to be hidden. On that note-

Those of you who asked for a record of recent actions in Ensembl, if you login (registration is free) a history of recent genes, transcripts, variations and locations you visit will appear in the tabs. Give it a try!

Many of you asked for tools and functionality that exist, such as CpG islands, (available as a track in Location view) a map of gene structure for all isoforms of a gene, and SyntenyView. To aid in the discoverability of these tools, our main search will be configured to also yield results from help pages. This should help people find what they’re looking for, without relying on browsing alone. Also, we will make more use of this blog by posting “Did You Know?” tips that will help you learn about functionalities of Ensembl and BioMart that may not be completely transparent. The archive (older) sites in particular don’t appear to be easy to find (the link is a small one, at the bottom of each Ensembl page), we address this in our FAQ section.

As for other requests for functionality we don’t yet have, these are being taken on board, and will hopefully lead to exciting new developments in the future.

Thanks again for your feedback!

The Ensembl Team

by ·Comments Off on Seasons Greetings and Upcoming Features

Happy holidays from Ensembl! Here in Hinxton, we are planning new developments for the new year (what else would we do with all this snow!) Some of the highlights planned for early next year include:

  • The first gene set for turkey in Ensembl, and inclusion of turkey into pairwise (between two species) whole-genome alignments and multiple species alignments (including a new 3-way avian alignment).
  • Inclusion (merge) of manual curation of the zebra-fish genome by the HAVANA group into the Ensembl gene set.
  • Update to dbSNP 132 for variations in the human genome.
  • Sea Urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) and Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) genomes in the Ensembl Metazoa site. See other upcoming species to Ensembl genomes here.

Don’t forget, an overview of upcoming annotation to Ensembl is on our roadmap.

For those of you going on holiday soon, enjoy! We look forward to supporting all your cutting-edge scientific endeavors in 2011.

The Ensembl Team

by ·Comments Off on Release 60

The Ensembl project is pleased to announce release 60 of Ensembl. Highlights of this release are:

* New species – Giant Panda
* New assemblies and genebuilds for zebrafish and rabbit
* Improved design of the Variation Table
* New display for GO terms
* Improved navigation on Region in Detail, including autocompletion of gene display names (e.g. HGNC)

For more information visit:
http://e60.ensembl.org/info/website/news/index.html

The Ensembl Team

by ·Comments Off on Maintenance Finished

Hi Ensembl Users,

The work is finished, and search is working on archives again.

Just a warning. Maintenance work this afternoon (18 Aug, 2:45 to 5 PM in the UK) could affect the live site. If this is the case, please try our mirror site at uswest.ensembl.org

Search will be temporarily disabled on the archive sites for versions 55–57. If BioMart queries are slow, please use the interface at www.biomart.org.

Regards,
The Ensembl Team

by ·Comments Off on New Features to Aid Browsing

With the recent release of version 58, we are pleased to announce a few features designed to make genome browsing simpler. Have you noticed the search function in the individual tables? For example, in the Gene tab: “Variation Table“, search for a variation ID.

Have a look at our sortable tables. In this example, we can sort by ID, Type, location, allele, source, or validation status. Use the arrows next to the column title to choose a new column to sort by. Searchable, and sortable, tables can also be found for orthologues, variations across individuals or strains, protein motifs and domains, and more.

If you are browsing a genomic region, you may have noticed that the Location tab: “Region in detail” view has a sliding zoom bar. Zoom out to view neighbouring genes and features, or zoom in to your favourite exon.

by ·Comments Off on Genomics and Transcriptomics in Mexico

As part of the EBI Roadshow training programme, Ensembl teamed up with ArrayExpress to run workshops for students, postdocs, and professors at ITESM, UNAM, and CIBNOR in these bioinformatic tools. The response was very positive. Feedback from 86 participants includes comments such as:

“I am an undergraduate student, and know little about bioinformatics. In the future, I will be able to use EBI as my primary resource.”

“It is a really good opportunity to now get all these tools, to help facilitate understanding and analysis of scientific data”

“An excellent course, and very useful tools!”

Ensembl and ArrayExpress were ranked by 99% of participants as being useful to their work. Not only are people made more aware of individual projects through these workshops, EBI resources are publicised. 31% of our participants were unaware of EBI resources before the workshop, which contrasts to 95% responding that after this workshop, they would most likely use EBI resources. 88% of participants would like more training in these resources and others; specifically mentioned were ontologies, proteomics, and genome sequencing as topics to learn more about. This reflects a need for bioinformatics courses in the life sciences in that part of the world, if not in all the world.

And finally, an after-effect of the workshops was to prove that there is a lot of interest in bioinformatics. This from our host at CIBNOR:

“CIBNOR is in a growing stage, we have a project for an Innovation and Technology Park and I am trying to convince people about the need for a Bioinformatics Unit. I am sure that things like this course will help us a lot.”

We greatly enjoyed training in Mexico, because of all the keen interest, energy, and the evenings on the sand dunes. We took the course into the field, discovering a pufferfish and spine on the beach, in honor of vertebrate genomes!

by ·Comments Off on New on Pre!

Updated elephant and gorilla genomes are now available on the Ensembl Pre! site.

They will be released in full with annotated gene sets in Ensembl 57 (due spring 2010). The new gorilla assembly (gorGor2) includes short-read and capillary sequences. The elephant genome (Loxafr3.0) was also updated, and is at 7x coverage. The 57 release will present new genebuilds for both species.