Ensembl Regulatory Features - now Martable

Release 55 has lots of goodies - not least the new, coordinated, GRCh37 assembly (more on that later), but one addition is the Martability of Ensembl Regulatory Features. Regulatory features are on by default on Human and Mouse, and each gene has a specific page for the regulatory features (for example http://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Gene/Regulation?g=ENSG00000139618). Regulatory Features are developing fast, and the Martability is bringing out the richer information in the functional genomics database - for example, the classification of features into "promoter", "gene associated" and "unclassified". Next release we're hoping to release a more graphical view for each feature, but the present of the regulatory features in Mart allows the large scale users - from Perl, Java, R or just plain-only tab delimited text - to use them.

We're expecting alot of development in this area - the addition of Mouse DNaseI sites has allowed us to develop a Mouse build, and of course, the ENCODE project which is now on line in production mode will provide a far richer, deeper, dataset to work against.

So - watch this space.