Ensembl events in September 2009

The Summer holiday time is almost over, so the Ensembl trainers are getting up to speed again in preparation for Autumn, which will be the busiest time of year for them.

The coming month we will have the following Ensembl events:

7 Sep: Demo for the National Genetics Reference Lab, Manchester, UK
7-10 Sep: Ensembl module in the EBI roadshow at the University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
16-17 Sep: Browser workshop at the Erasmus MC Molecular Medicine Postgraduate School, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

For details about these and other upcoming events, please have a look at the complete list of Ensembl training events.

Do you want to attend an Ensembl workshop, but are we never coming to your part of the world? Why not see if you can host a workshop at your own university / institute? For more information have a look here or mail us.

If you are in the Western US, we also may still be able to include your university / institute in our Western US tour coming January. Interested? Please mail me for more details.

EnsemblFungi (beta) now available...

In addition to Release 2 of Ensembl Genomes early this month, EBI-EMBL would also like to announce the new arrival of Ensembl Fungi (beta).

Release includes:

• 2 yeast genomes: Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe.
  

• 7 Aspergillus genomes A.clavatus, A.flavus, A.fumigatus, A.niger, A.oryzae, A.terreus and Neosartorya fischeri.

If you have any comments or feedback please do not hesitate to contact us at helpdesk@ensemblgenomes.org.

BLAST downtime now over

To our BLAST users,

BLAST is online again, the maintenance is finished.

Thank you for your patience.

The Ensembl team.

We have scheduled some downtime for our BLAST database servers on Monday 10th August *Postponed to Tuesday, 11 Aug*, in order to install some security patches. We will also be trying out an upgrade path and pushing that out to the main BLAST server if it proves compatible. There will be a downtime of between 30 minutes and 12 hours, depending on how smoothly the maintenance goes. The rest of the Ensembl website should be unaffected.

We suggest that you avoid running BLAST or BLAT searches in the 48 hours preceding the maintenance work as we cannot guarantee that data will not be lost. We will update this post as soon as the maintanance has been finished.

Thank you for your patience,
The Ensembl Team

Ensembl Genomes: Release 2

EMBL-EBI is pleased to announce release 2 of Ensembl Genomes; extending Ensembl further across the taxonomic space!

Highlights for this release include:

• 9 new genomes of Escherichia species; 4 new Bacillus and Streptococcus genomes; and additional genomes of Mycobacterium and Staphylococcus genera added to Ensembl Bacteria; taking the total bacteria species/strain count to 134.

• Bacillus subtilis now represented using the re-annotation by Barbe et al. (Microbiology 155 2009, 1758-1775).

• New Plasmodium falciparum build based on the current release of PlasmoDB, 5.5.

• Updated build of Drosophila melanogaster and the inclusion of 11 additional drosophilid species, based on Flybase release FB2008_10

• Updated build of Caenorhbditis elegans, and the inclusion of 4 additional Caenorhabditis species, based on WormBase release WS200

• Comparative genomic analyses (bacteria, protist, metazoan and pan-taxonomic Compara databases) updated.

• Ensembl 54 software
  

Keep an eye out for Release 3 in September, which will include plants and fungi...