- Course overview
- Search within this course
- Why Ensembl?
- What is Ensembl?
- When to use Ensembl
- How to access Ensembl
- How to search Ensembl
- How to search Ensembl
- Exploring sources of biological data
- Navigating Ensembl
- Customise Ensembl
- Manage your data
- Export data
- Download data with BioMart
- Bulk download genome-wide data files with FTP
- Ensembl tools
- Summary
- Guided examples of using Ensembl
- Exercises
- Your feedback
- Get help and support on Ensembl
- Acknowledgements
- Learn more
How to search Ensembl
Search www.ensembl.org (Video 2) using:
- a gene name (for example, BRCA2) (Figure 4)
- an identifier from an external database, such as UniProt accession number or a PDBe ID
- a disease name (for example, coronary heart disease)
- a variant ID (for example, rs1223)
- a location – a genomic region (for example, rat X:100000..200000)
- a Gene Ontology (GO) term

Most search results will take you to the appropriate Ensembl view through a results page. If you search using a location you will be directed straight to the location tab (this tab provides a view of a region of a genome).
The different tabs in Ensembl will be explained in the later section ‘Navigating Ensembl‘. For now we will concentrate on how to search Ensembl.