The Ensembl Genomes Project is pleased to announce release 16 of Ensembl Genomes.
In this release, new species include Hordeum vulgare (barley), Solanum tuberosum (potato) and Musa acuminata (banana) in Ensembl Plants; and Nasonia vitripennis (the jewel wasp) and Anopheles darlingi (Central and South American malaria mosquito) in Ensembl Metazoa. Improvements on the wheat assembly and the ability to highlight annotations in gene trees have also been released.
Barley is among the world’s earliest domesticated crop species, is the fourth most abundant cereal worldwide and is a traditional model for plant genetic research. It has a large diploid genome of about 5.1Gb in size. A draft genome sequence containing the majority of barley genes and integrated with the physical map has been recently published in Nature. The genome is now available in Ensembl Plants.
We have improved the alignment of a draft wheat assembly to Brachypodium distachyon and updated our presentation of wheat homoeologous SNPs using the Brachypodium reference.
Significant milestones of this release are:
* Ensembl Genomes displays the inferred evolutionary history of gene families in gene trees. Branches sharing specific annotation terms can now be highlighted indicating the evolution of gene function (view example) .
* Ensembl Plants updates:
- Three new genomes: Hordeum vulgare (barley), Solanum tuberosum (potato) and Musa acuminata (banana)
- New EST alignments for Physcomitrella patens (moss)
- New repeats feature annotation for Selaginella moellendorffii (lycopod)
- Updated gene models for Glycine max (soybean)
- Updated peptide comparative genomics
* Ensembl Metazoa updates:
- Two new species: Nasonia vitripennis (the jewel wasp) and Anopheles darlingi (Central and South American malaria mosquito),
- New variation dataset for Anopheles gambiae (from the insecticide resistance study at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine) and use of LD and transcript displays for A. gambiae variation data,
- Updated Pristionchus pacificus cross-references,
- Updated Caenorhabditis brenneri, Caenorhabditis japonica and Caenorhabditis remanei gene models and assembly,
- Update Drosophila melanogaster to FlyBase 5.46 including the gene models and variation consequences.
* Ensembl Fungi updates:
- Addition of Fusarium oxysporum variation database based on sequencing of 27 different strains from the ENA Sequence Read Archive,
- Updated data in Puccinia graminis,
- Descriptions and gene names were imported from the Broad Institute,
- Missing InterPro annotations were added,
- ncRNA stable identifiers were updated,
- repeat features to Botryotinia fuckeliana.
* Ensembl Protists updates:
- repeat features added for Albugo laibachii,
- protein features updated for all species.
* Update of pan homology comparative genomics database to include latest versions of genomes from Ensembl and Ensembl Genomes
* Updated BioMarts
* Software migration to Ensembl 69
The Ensembl Genomes Team