- Course overview
- Search within this course
- Why Ensembl?
- When to use Ensembl
- How to access Ensembl
- How to search 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
All materials are free cultural works licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, except where further licensing details are provided.
The Ensembl project
The Ensembl project seeks to enable genomic science by providing high quality, integrated annotation on chordate and selected eukaryotic genomes within a consistent and accessible infrastructure.
All data are open access and all software is open source, i.e. freely available to the scientific community.
The project began in 1999 as a joint project between the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (then named the Sanger Centre). This changed between 2014 and 2017, with all staff and eventually all hardware moving over to the EMBL-EBI.
Supported species include comprehensive, evidence-based gene annotations and a selected set of genomes includes additional data focused on variation, comparative, evolutionary, functional and regulatory annotation. The most advanced resources are provided for key species including human, mouse, rat and zebrafish reflecting the popularity and importance of these species in biomedical research.
 The website and underlying databases (along with the application programming interfaces (APIs)) are updated every 2-3 months. Previous releases of Ensembl can be accessed from the Ensembl Archive. |
As of Ensembl release 109 (February 2023), over 300 species are supported, along with 15 mouse strains, 4 dog breeds and 20 pig breeds. Associations between sequence variants and diseases, and potential gene regulation sequences across different cell types are among the cutting edge data integrated and displayed in the Ensembl browser and underlying databases.