28 October, 2010

Ensembl workshop (ASHG 2010)

Our workshop at the ASHG Annual Meeting has been sold out this year!

During this session we will explore the latest assembly of the human genome and show some of the highlights of our genome browser. In order to make things easier for participants, we have put together a document that should allow you to follow the session. Dowload this document from here (429KB).

If you are in DC these days come and visit us (booth #527).

Greetings from Washington.

19 October, 2010

Ensembl Events in November 2010

As usual November is a busy month for the Ensembl outreach team:

2 Nov: Ensembl demo at the EBI Open Day, Hinxton, UK
5 Nov: Browser workshop at the American Society of Human Genetics Annual Meeting 2010, Washington DC, US
3-9 Nov: Ensembl module in the Computational & Comparative Genomics course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, US
10 Nov: Browser workshop at the Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, ME, US
11 Nov: Demo for EBI / EMBL PhD students, Hinxton, UK
12 Nov: Browser workshop at Middlebury College, VT, US
16-17 Nov: Ensembl module in The Genome Access Course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, US
16-17 Nov: Ensembl browser workshop at MRC Harwell, UK
18 Nov: Ensembl module in the The Bioinformatics Roadshow at the MRC - National Institute for Medical Research, London, UK
22-24 Nov: Developers workshop for EBI and Sanger Institute employees, Hinxton, UK
23 Nov: Browser workshop at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas, Madrid, Spain
25 Nov: Browser workshop at University College Dublin, Ireland

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

05 October, 2010

More database maintenance

Unfortunately our database storage is still unstable, and all Ensembl dbs are being taken offline this afternoon for emergency maintenance work. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

This will affect all UK-based sites, including www.ensembl.org, pre.ensembl.org, Vega and the archives. The US West mirror, uswest.ensembl.org, will be running with reduced functionality (no user logins or BLAST, which depend on Sanger dbs), and the cloud-based useast.ensembl.org should be unaffected.

For detailed web status updates, you can also follow us at twitter.com/ensembl_web.

Ensembl Wants to Know What You Think!

Dear Ensembl Users,

Our survey is still open. Please consider giving us 10 minutes of your time to let us know what you think of our website. This will help us make Ensembl more usable.

Click on the link, and pass it around! We want to hear from new users as well.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KCR6WN2

Many thanks,
The Ensembl Team

04 October, 2010

Reduced website functionality on 5th October 2010. - Now postponed


This work has been postponed and the Ensembl site is now running as normal. We will update the blog informing you when this work is rescheduled.


The Systems team at the Sanger Institute need to carry out emergency maintenance to some of the database servers running the ensembl websites from 9.30 am tomorrow morning. This means that we will be running the live Ensembl site with reduced functionality and the Pre, Vega, NCBI36 and archive sites will temporarily be off line.

Blast, Biomart, user-logins and search will all be unavailable. The entire Ensembl website should be considered as "At risk", however should the main site go down the two mirror sites, uswest.ensembl.org and useast.ensembl.org should still be available although these too will have reduced functionality.

We apologise for inconvenience this may cause and will work to ensure the disruption occurs for the shortest time possible.

02 October, 2010

Main Ensembl site offline - now fixed (3/10/10 6pm)

The site is now back.

There is a problem with the storage attached to the database servers which has taken the main Ensembl site offline. Please use one of our two mirror sites http://uswest.ensembl.org and http://useast.ensembl.org. We will update the blog when the main site is working again, we apologise for any inconvenience caused.