We are glad to announce the launch of our latest installment.

Ensembl Release 63 (e63) includes a new high-coverage assembly for microbat (Myotis lucifugus), the most recent human and zebrafish manual gene annotations from Havana, and a fresh update of mouse variation data, among numerous other additions. The previous Ensembl release is archived at e62.ensembl.org.

Tracks on Region in detail and Region overview pages can now be reordered by dragging them to a new position on the image. The strand of the track can still be identified by a colour and a text message when passing the mouse over the track bar.

 

The popular Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) tool has been updated in e63, including speed improvements and a renewed support for variants that fall in regulatory regions.

 

Pie charts have been added to the human variation pages for the 1000 Genomes population allele frequencies.

A new configuration table facilitates the exploration of regulatory data, including the capacity to search for specific markers of interest.  To access this functionality, click on ‘Configure this page’ while on a Location View or a Regulatory Region View and select ‘Regulatory Evidence’.

 

A new microbat genome assembly brings it from low to high-coverage. A new genebuild has been performed on this assembly using the Ensembl gene annotation pipeline.

 

Users of our Perl API will certainly enjoy the new Doxygen-based API documentation, with an improved user interface, better support for object-oriented programming and a comprehensive search tool. There is also an updated Regulation API tutorial to help users access regulatory data programmatically.

More details on some of these changes will be posted soon, so keep an eye on our blog!

More information also available on the Ensembl website.