0%

What is Ensembl Genomes?

Ensembl BacteriaProtistsFungiPlants and Metazoa (collectively, ‘Ensembl Genomes’) are five portals for genome-scale data (Figure 1), developed in close collaboration with scientific communities of experts in the biology of individual species. Implemented using the Ensembl software suite which was developed for the study of vertebrate genomes, Ensembl Genomes provides a powerful and consistent set of interactive and programmatic interfaces for non-vertebrate genomes. It provides access to data including gene predictions, comparative analysis, variant annotation and transcriptomic alignments. Since its establishment in 2009, the resource has grown rapidly and now contains over 2,000 eukaryotic and 30,000 prokaryotic genomes.

Figure 1 Ensembl Genomes entry page showing the five portals on the right-hand side.

Data sources

Ensembl Genomes provides access to genome-scale data through a number of interfaces, including a web browser, a search-optimised data warehouse, a tool for bulk data export and various programmatic interfaces. The data come from a variety of sources, including collaborators in the scientific community, publicly available data archives and computational analysis pipelines run at EMBL-EBI and elsewhere. As the scientific scope of the project is exceptionally broad, the goal is to provide an up-to-date view of core annotation as recognised by the relevant scientific communities. This is integrated with data from other species through the use of shared interfaces and comparative analysis.

Wherever possible, Ensembl Genomes actively collaborates with community groups in the management of data and the development of services, including:

Ensembl Genomes also shows annotations from leading model organism databases such as:

  • DictyBase (for Dictyostelium discoideum)
  • FlyBase (for Drosophila)
  • SGD (for Saccharomyces cerevisiae).