Today the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) announced plans to reorganise the Ensembl project so that we can best leverage the strengths of Ensembl’s parent institutes to capitalise on emerging opportunities in genomics

From our users’ perspective, all existing Ensembl services including our genome browser, APIs and regular releases will continue as usual. Behind the scenes, the current Ensembl services will be consolidated at EMBL-EBI to help us strengthen the existing resources and facilitate closer links with UniProt, Ensembl Genomes and the Expression Atlas, which are all based at EMBL-EBI. Ensembl will also continue to be closely involved in the GENCODE project coordinated at Sanger.

New Ensembl activities that focus on novel methods for storing and representing human variation will be based at the Sanger Institute. These efforts will be aligned with the aims of the global alliance for the secure sharing of genomic and clinical data. As part of the reorganisation, Ensembl will also be connected more closely with the DECIPHER project. DECIPHER is an interactive, web-based service to support sharing of likely functional, rare clinical variation and engagement with the clinical community.  These connections will improve clinically relevant access to the rich genome annotations provided within Ensembl.

This is an extraordinary time for genomics. Ensembl has supported and contributed to the dramatic advances in genomics over almost 15 years and we are excited about what the future holds.