The past days I was in Barcelona at the European Human Genetics Conference 2008. After giving my presentation on Ensembl in one of the ‘Educational sessions’ and listening to numerous talks about GWAS (genome-wide association studies), I had a look at the posters. Under the impression that the UCSC Genome Browser is the preferred browser amongst (human) geneticists and with Ewan’s experience at the recent ‘Biology of Genomes’ meeting fresh in my mind, I decided to have a closer look at the posters in the Cytogenetics section. Out of 189 posters, I could positively identify 11 with Ensembl screenshots (mostly CytoView and ContigView, but also two times KaryoView), 8 with UCSC Genome Browser screenshots and none with NCBI Map Viewer screenshots. OK, I admit that I can recognise almost any pixel copied from our site and may have missed one or two UCSC screenshots, but all in all I thought this was a very encouraging result! Of course we should keep in mind that this was a European conference, mainly attended by European scientists …. I guess I have a bit more screenshot counting to do at the International Congress of Genetics 2008 in Berlin. So, let’s say Ensembl 11 – UCSC 8 is the score at half time …. next month I’ll report back with the final result!