The Ensembl VEP does not only allow you to annotate short variants, such as SNPs and short insertions or deletions, but also some types of structural variants.
Category: Ensembl VEP
Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: install using Docker
We know that installing the VEP is not always trivial – there are dependencies and modules that you may or may not have already, and your existing setup may require different module versions. It’s also designed for a Linux system and installing on, for example, Windows, can be complex. To get around this, the VEP and all its dependencies are available in a Docker image, so that you can install everything with just a few simple commands.
Continue readingCool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: write your own plugin
Plugins can be an excellent way to extend the functionality of the VEP. They can be used to look-up information in external databases or use the Ensembl API to add to or filter your VEP output. Many plugins have already been written, both by us and external groups, but with a bit of Perl you can easily write your own.
Continue readingCool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: external gene regulation annotation
The interpretation of non-coding variants is more challenging than that of coding variants as less prediction methods and reference data are available. On top of the annotation provided for human and mouse in the Ensembl Regulatory Build, the Ensembl Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) also integrates two other human-specific datasets providing information about how variants can affect gene expression. The plugins, satMutMPRA and FunMotifs, are available for use with command-line VEP. One provides detailed information on the impact on expression of variants in the regulatory regions of disease-associated genes; the other an alternative set of genome-wide transcription factor binding motifs.
Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: transcript selection
By default VEP will tell you the consequences for every transcript affected by a variant. You may wish to prioritise your analysis to only the most important or well supported transcripts for each gene, and VEP provides information to help you do that.
Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: predict pathogenicity of missense variants
Some missense variants have significant impact on the protein function, some do not. In the absence of global comprehensive functional assays of missense variants, the next best way to assess if a missense variant is likely to be pathogenic is through prediction tools which take into account factors like the chemical properties of amino acids, functional protein domains and protein conservation to predict how likely it is that a missense variant will impact function. A number of different missense pathogenicity predictors are available for human through Ensembl VEP, and these are are optimised for different purposes.
Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: VEP an animal
With all the fuss we make about our resources for human genomes, you might think the VEP was just for human; it’s not. We have really useful resources, like SIFT, phenotypes and caches for loads of other species in Ensembl.
Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: parse protein HGVS
HGVS notation is an excellent way to describe variants in proteins, and VEP can interpret variants described this way to see if they are already known or if they affect other genomic features, so long as there is enough information to find a unique genomic location. If there isn’t, the Variant Recoder can help you to find the variant you need.
Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: where in a transcript?
Interpreting a single variant can be a lot more involved than just finding out its consequence. Sometimes to understand a variant, you need to know exactly where it falls, which exon, which amino acid, sometimes even which base in the codon. The VEP gives you all of this by default.
Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: check conservation
If you’re really delving into the role of a particular genetic variant, you might want to know about that base position in other species. VEP can get you ancestral alleles in human and conservation scores in many species for a variant position allowing you to assess if a position is evolutionarily important, or if an allele matches our primate ancestors.