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.
Category: Training
News about workshops, webinars, online courses etc.
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.
A guide to hosting an Ensembl Workshop
Are you interested in having us come to your institute to deliver an Ensembl workshop, but are not quite sure what it involves? This blog is a guide for you.
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.
Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: phenotype and disease associations
If you’re trying to work out which variants are associated with a phenotype or disease, a major thing you might want to know is if someone else has already spotted it. And if not the variant, maybe the gene that it hits. You can get that through the VEP.
Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: take your pick
The number of genes and transcripts we have in Ensembl can make your VEP results very big. Filtering your results after running the VEP is the best way to make this more manageable, but you can also reduce the results in your run itself, to only get one result per variant or variant/gene combo.
Custom data upload: creating URLs for large files
Did you know you can upload your own data for display alongside the reference genomes in Ensembl? For some file types, and files larger than 20MB in size you will need to create a URL to attach the data, rather than uploading from your local directory. It’s not difficult to create these URLs, but there are quite a few steps, so read on to find out how!