Ensembl genome browser

Abstract

Recent years have seen the release of huge amounts of sequence data from genome sequencing centers. However, this raw sequence data is most valuable to the laboratory biologist when provided along with quality annotation of the genomic sequence. Ensembl provides access to genomic information with a number of visualization tools, becoming one of the world's primary resources for genomic research, a resource through which scientists can access the human genome as well as the genomes of other model organisms. Thus, researchers can download data directly, whether it is the DNA sequence of a genomic contig, or positions of SNPs in a given gene. The key Ensembl web pages are highlighted in this chapter. Because of the complexity of the genome and the many different ways in which scientists want to use it, Ensembl provides many levels of access with a high degree of flexibility. Through the Ensembl website a wet-lab researcher with a simple web browser can for example perform BLAST searches against the assembly of a genome, download a genomic sequence, or search for all members of a determined protein family. But Ensembl is also an all-round software and database system that can be installed locally to serve the needs of a genomic center or a bioinformatics division in a pharmaceutical company, enabling complex data mining of the genome or large-scale sequence annotation.