Musing about Fish Alignments.

Release 57 saw the release of a 5-way EPO alignment across the telost fish - Zebrafish, Stickleback, Medaka, Tetraodon and Fugu. Just recently I've spent some time browsing through them. They are very interesting, with the ancestral duplication in Fish showing more complex homology relationships than in mammals. Here's a nice, clean example

Simple Fish multiple alignments

Here is a far more complex region, when ENREDO has clearly picked up the ancestral duplication but is struggling to make it colinear across the entire region

Complex Fish multiple alignments

One thing which I don't think most people appreciate is the incredible phylogenetic depth in the telost linage. In terms of "millions of years of evolution" or "sequence divergence" actually the deepest splits in the telosts - such as ZebraFish to Stickleback - are almost as deep as telosts to mammals - certainly deeper than birds to mammals. So this is asking alot to find good, clearly co linear stretches, in particular when you think of the draft nature of these genomes.

Chatting to Javier, it might be much better to also look at a 4-way EPO on the "Stickleback" side of the telost linage, in other words, Medaka/Stickleback/Fugu/Tetraodon. This I think will come together better (in fact most of the "nice" regions in the 5-way EPO are actually regions without ZebraFish) and we might be able to look at taking that ancestral chromosome ordering and perhaps sequence in comparisons to Zebrafish.

Ensembl, Xfam and HMMs

This week, Albert Vilella and myself participated in the Xfam consortium meeting. The meeting focussed on protein, domains and ncRNA classification, and on the new developments of the HMMER package.

Although Ensembl is not part of Xfam, we share many interests. We are getting increasingly interested in the use HMMER models, especially since the release of HMMER3.0. Also, in the forthcoming release (version 58), Ensembl will provide gene trees for ncRNAs. Most of these ncRNA genes are annotated using Rfam models.

Stay tuned for more!

Neandertal Genome Browser

In collaboration with the Neandertal Genome Project, we have created an Ensembl-style browser of the Neandertal data available at http://projects.ensembl.org/neandertal. A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome was published in the May 7 issue of Science.

The Neandertal browser includes the ability to visualise the Neandertal data using the new Resembl code developed in collaboration with Illumina. The Resembl code will be introduced in the 1000 Genomes browser later this month and in Ensembl over the summer.

Data include:
- Neandertal sequencing reads from all 6 Neandertal fossils
- Neandertal contigs/consensus from all individuals combined
- Modern human sequencing reads to put the divergence of the Neandertal genomes into perspective
- Selective sweep scan to detect positive selection in early modern humans
- A catalog of changes consisting of Neandertal alleles for positions of non-synonymous difference between human and chimpanzee

Full details of the data types and instructions for using our new display tools are available on the data information page.

Links are also provided from the Neandertal Browser home page to the raw sequence data stored at the EBI for the Neandertal genome project and the modern human genome data.


Further information about the project is available from the project page at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, from the genome paper and from other companion papers in the same issue of science.

We thank Janet Kelso, Ed Green and Udo Stenzel at the MPI for assistance and Eugene Kulesha at the EBI for work to create the Neandertal browser.

SNPedia in Ensembl

Ensembl is always extending the variation pages to include more information. Did you know that the latest data from SNPedia is now available?

SNPedia is a wiki-style resource for human genetics with public annotation of over 11,000 SNPs, released under a Creative Commons style license. We have integrated it into Ensembl, so you can view these SNP reports along with our other information including variations, genotype and allele frequencies from dbSNP, and SNPs from other sources including UniProt, Affymetrix and Illumina chipsets and phenotype annotations from several genome-wide association studies.

You need to configure the page to view SNPedia. From the variation page, e.g. rs1333049, click on "Configure this page" and then click on "External Data" to select SNPedia to appear in the left hand side menu of all variation pages via DAS. As this information comes directly from SNPedia via DAS it is always up-to-date.

Eyjafjallajökulled?

This could be come a new word in English is it becomes more frequent... well whilst most of Europe was grounded (and some colleagues from Ensembl stranded throughout the world) we only had to postpone one workshop... And our tour of Australia continued (we only had domestic flights and these weren't disrupted), coming to an end this week (I'm flying to Canberra where the ANU is hosting the last of the series).

Great feedback (thanks for filling those surveys, guys!), and our SNP Effect Predictor tool is becoming very useful, this trip also gave us a a chance to test (first hand) the speed of access to the browser and API from Australia.

This coming month, as Bert has already posted, we are attending a couple of conferences in France, if you are attending the Paris workshop (it may not be too late to register if you plan to be in town) you will have to clear security (it's hosted at the UNESCO at the end of the day), so come early (with your passport or ID card), we are also running a workshop in Montepellier (thanks to HUGO and specially Cathy for this one).

Back to Europe soon,

ǝsoX

Ensembl Events in May 2010

In May we will have the following Ensembl events:

3-4 May: Ensembl module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute & Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, US
6 May: Demo for the National Genetics Reference Lab, Manchester, UK
10 May: Browser workshop at the 3rd Variome Project Meeting, Paris, France
10-12 May: Ensembl module in the Wellcome Trust Open Door Workshop - Working with the Human Genome Sequence in Hinxton, UK
11 May: Ensembl Genomes module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at the Scottish Bioinformatics Forum, Edinburgh, UK
17 May: Browser workshop at the Human Genome Meeting 2010, Montpellier, France
18-20 May: Ensembl module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at the CSC - IT Center for Science, Helsinki, Finland
18-20 May: Ensembl Genomes module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at the CSC - IT Center for Science, Helsinki, Finland
27-28 May: Browser workshop at the University of Cambridge, UK

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

Shortcut addresses for Ensembl versions

Want to be sure you are going to the right version of Ensembl? Whilst our archives can be accessed through the link at the bottom of each page, if you want to cite a particular version or access it directly, you previously needed to know the month and year of release to find the archive site (e.g. may2009.archive.ensembl.org).

Now, for the convenience of our users, we have introduced shortcuts that include the version number instead of the date. For example, typing:

e54.ensembl.org

into your browser will redirect you to the same May 2009 archive.

We have put these redirects in as far back as e30 - if the archive no longer exists, you will be directed to the next most recent one (unless doing so would mean a change of assembly, in which case you are redirected back to the last archive on your chosen assembly, if available).

P.S. Don't forget the 'e' at the beginning - we can't use plain numbers as it causes problems with DNS servers

¡ə Ensembl Down Under

Ensembl is running a series of workshops in Oz, starting today in Melbourne at the VLSCI (tomorrow we have a couple of seminars at the WEHI and Peter MacCallun). Later this week we will have a further workshop in Adelaide, to continue next week in Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra. So if you are in the area, why don't you come around?

Furthermore, we took this opportunity to finished the details of another coming workshop in Paris hosted by the Human Variome Project where in addition to Ensembl we will discuss other EBI resources such as EGA. There are still some seats available if you happen to be in Paris in May

Greetings from Melbourne.

Ensembl Events in April 2010 - Ensembl goes Down Under

When we show during workshops a map of the world with the places that have been visited by the Ensembl Outreach team, people are often surprised that we never have been to Australia yet. Well, coming month this is going to change as two of my colleagues will travel to Down Under for a whole series of workshops:

12 Apr: Browser workshop at the University of Melbourne
15-16 Apr: Browser workshop at the University of Adelaide, Adelaide
21-22 Apr: Browser module in the PANDA workshop at the University of New South Wales, Sydney
23 Apr: Developers workshop at the University of New South Wales, Sydney
27-28 Apr: Browser module in the PANDA workshop at the University of Queensland / Griffith University, Brisbane
29 Apr: Developers workshop at the University of Queensland / Griffith University, Brisbane
29-30 Apr: Browser workshop at the Australian National University, Canberra

Aside from that there are many more Ensembl events in other parts of the world this month:

7-9 Apr: Browser module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at the University of Florence, Florence, Italy
15-16 Apr: Browser workshop at the Erasmus MC Molecular Medicine Postgraduate School, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
19 Apr: Browser workshop at the VIB Flanders Interuniversity Institute of Biotechnology, Leuven, Belgium
20 Apr: Browser workshop at the VIB Flanders Interuniversity Institute of Biotechnology, Ghent, Belgium
20-21 Apr: Browser module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, US *postponed to 3,4 May*
21 Apr: Developers workshop at the Hubrecht Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands
22-23 Apr: Browser module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, US *postponed to 3,4 May*
26-27 Apr: Browser module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, US
28-30 Apr: Developers workshop at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
29-30 Apr: Browser module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, US

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

Genomics and Transcriptomics in Mexico

As part of the EBI Roadshow training programme, Ensembl teamed up with ArrayExpress to run workshops for students, postdocs, and professors at ITESM, UNAM, and CIBNOR in these bioinformatic tools. The response was very positive. Feedback from 86 participants includes comments such as:

"I am an undergraduate student, and know little about bioinformatics. In the future, I will be able to use EBI as my primary resource."

"It is a really good opportunity to now get all these tools, to help facilitate understanding and analysis of scientific data"

"An excellent course, and very useful tools!"

Ensembl and ArrayExpress were ranked by 99% of participants as being useful to their work. Not only are people made more aware of individual projects through these workshops, EBI resources are publicised. 31% of our participants were unaware of EBI resources before the workshop, which contrasts to 95% responding that after this workshop, they would most likely use EBI resources. 88% of participants would like more training in these resources and others; specifically mentioned were ontologies, proteomics, and genome sequencing as topics to learn more about. This reflects a need for bioinformatics courses in the life sciences in that part of the world, if not in all the world.

And finally, an after-effect of the workshops was to prove that there is a lot of interest in bioinformatics. This from our host at CIBNOR:

"CIBNOR is in a growing stage, we have a project for an Innovation and Technology Park and I am trying to convince people about the need for a Bioinformatics Unit. I am sure that things like this course will help us a lot."

We greatly enjoyed training in Mexico, because of all the keen interest, energy, and the evenings on the sand dunes. We took the course into the field, discovering a pufferfish and spine on the beach, in honor of vertebrate genomes!

Orthologues on the trees

We have added a little trick for orthology-lovers. Starting from the orthologues page, you can choose to switch to the GeneTree. This will highlight the orthologue of interest, as well as the ancestral node that relates both genes.

Another useful feature added in Ensembl 57 is the possibility to display a set of genes (up to 10) using the Multi-Species view. Click on an internal node and select the "Jump to Multi-species view" option. This will show each of these genes in their respective genomic location, with genomic alignments when available.

New avian and new fish mutliple alignments

Ensembl 57 includes the turkey genome, the third bird in Ensembl. We are now providing a 3-way avian multiple alignments (chicken, turkey and zebra finch) together with GERP constraint analysis. The image shows amniote and bird constrained elements on the chicken genome.

We have also added a new set of fish multiple alignments (stickleback, medaka, takifugu, tetraodon and zebrafish). GERP constraint analysis is available on fish genomes as well.

Gene Trees now have intron ticks.

The gene tree images now have little intron "ticks" on them showing how the intron position is placed relative to the protein sequence. An example is shown above. Each tick is a little black line on each side of the green protein bars, on the right. As intron positions have been remarkably stable on the "chordate" side of the metazoan tree (ie, the deutrosomes), one should expect that the introns line up - if they do, it is good evidence that the alignment is right.

There are some interesting things. Ensembl models small frameshifts to create open reading frames around erroneous data as tiny introns. In this code you cannot distinguish these two classes of introns, but as these errors normally come in patches, a run of intron ticks unique to a genome is probably a set of errors (an example is in Gorilla). I've enjoyed browsing around some of my favourite genes to check out that the introns make sense.

There is some more to go here. The fact that the intron ticks disappear on collapsed nodes is a bit frustrating - it would be nice to see "consensus" intron positions (though this is a bit complex to execute underneath).

Ensembl browser workshop at ESHG 2010

The Ensembl Outreach team is pleased to offer a 1-day Ensembl browser workshop as a satellite to the European Human Genetics Conference 2010 that is held from 12-15 June in Gothenburg, Sweden. The workshop will be held on Friday 11 June at Gothenburg University and is free of charge for conference participants. Places are limited to 30 participants. More details can be found here.

Ensembl Genomes Release 4

We are pleased to announce the fourth release of Ensembl Genomes.

Ensembl Genomes is a companion project to Ensembl designed to provide access to genome scale data for non-chordate species of scientific interest.

Features of the new release include the addition of new databases for the bread mould Neurospora crassa to the Ensembl Fungi division, the slime mould Dictyostelium discoideum (built with the assistance of dictyBase) to Ensembl Protists, and the body louse Pediculus humanus (containing data provided by VectorBase) to Ensembl Metazoa.

The release also includes new variation databases for Drosophila melanogaster (using data from the Drosophila Population Genomics Project) and Plasmodium falciparum; the update of existing variation databases for Arabidopsis thaliana and Vitis vinifera in Ensembl Plants; and the addition of three new clades to Ensembl Bacteria.

Ensembl Genomes is available at http://www.ensemblgenomes.org

Ensembl Events in March 2010

In March we will have the following Ensembl events:

1-2 Mar: Ensembl module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at ITSEM, Mexico City, Mexico
3-5 Mar: Ensembl module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico
4 Mar: Ensembl demo at the EBI Open Day in Hinxton, UK
8-12 Mar: Ensembl module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at CIBNOR, La Paz, Baja California, Mexico
9-12 Mar: Ensembl module in the Wellcome Trust Open Door Workshop - Working with the Human Genome Sequence at the Instituto de Higiene, Montevideo, Uruguay

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

Ensembl Developers workshop 28-30 April 2010 in Cambridge, UK

From Wednesday April 28th till Friday April 30th 2010 we will give another Ensembl Developers workshop at the Genetics Department of the University of Cambridge in the UK. This 3-day workshop will cover the Ensembl Core API as well as two other APIs, which will be chosen from the Compara, Variation and Functional Genomics APIs, depending on the majority interest of the participants. For the workshop some experience with coding in Perl is required. There are no costs for the workshop (and organiser David Judge will even provide lots of free coffee, tea, orange juice, water, cookies, fruit etc. to keep you going ....).

To register for this workshop, please go here.

If you have any questions about the workshop you can mail me.

Calling all Americans (and Australians/NZ/Pacific Rim...)

For about 3 weeks now researchers in the US have had their default Ensembl go to our US west mirror (uswest.ensembl.org) automatically - if you just go to www.ensembl.org you brower gets automatically redirected. The US joined Japan and Canada who we switched in late 2009.

From our perspective, this is all working fine; the usage of uswest has gone up, and IP tracking on that shows far more US IP addresses (so the redirect is working fine!). We get some 3,000 odd visits a day, with some 50,000 pages delivered from our uswest site - about 20% of our total hits. Brilliant.

What is slightly more surprising is that we're not getting any queries on this. Given the usage, we think this means the default browser, content and other functionality must be working well (or Americans are very shy about complaining... but that doesn't sound like a good description of all Americans...). But we'd also like to hear from American users - have you noticed ensembl "go faster?". Are there any glitches?

Another issue we are unclear about is whether we should automatically shift other users on the Pacific Rim to automatically go to uswest - in terms of usage, the biggest country would be Australia, but New Zealand, Phillipines and other Pacific Rim countries would also be candidates. It's quite hard for us to assess whether our Europe (Cambridge UK) based servers or US west servers are best for this - both latency and throughput changes on different routes, and the time zone shift makes things complex to assess systematically in an easy way.


So - feedback welcome - either on this post or to helpdesk@ensembl.org about what your experience is, either from the US or from the pacific rim.

Ensembl Events in February 2010

In February we will have the following Ensembl events:

3-4 Feb: Ensembl module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at the University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK
11 Feb: Browser workshop for the NHS at Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, UK
11-12 Feb: Browser workshop at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
16-18 Feb: Ensembl module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at the Jozef Stefan Institute and University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
22-26 Feb: Ensembl API module in the Hands-on training at EBI - Programmatic Access To Biological Databases (Perl), Hinxton, UK

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

Ensembl Events in January 2010

For the beginning of the new year we have the following Ensembl events lined up:

9-13 Jan: Ensembl & Ensembl Genomes demo at the Plant and Animal Genome Conference XVIII, San Diego, CA, US
19-20 Jan: Ensembl module in the EBI Bioinformatics Roadshow at City of Hope, Duarte, CA, US
25-27 Jan: Ensembl module in the EBI Tools for Genomics and Proteomics workshop at the Moroccan Society of Bioinformatics, Tangier, Morocco
28 Jan: Browser workshop at the University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

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