Ensembl will be at the ASHG meeting in Boston this year. Look out for Paul Flicek (head of EBI Vertebrate Genomics, including Ensembl) and Emily Pritchard (Ensembl Outreach Officer) at the conference.

We’ll be holding a 90 min workshop entitled Ensembl Highlights Interactive Workshop: Intermediate/Advanced Users, taught by Emily. This workshop will look at some of the advanced access features in Ensembl, including BioMart, the Ensembl Perl APIs and custom data upload, as well as some of the new features in Ensembl, the Variant Effect Predictor, the REST API and sharing data. This course will only provide a very brief introduction to Ensembl itself: before the course you may wish to get up-to-date on what Ensembl is and the kind of data it provides using our Quick Tour. If you’re already registered for ASHG, you can register for the course through the ASHG conference website and there is a small charge of US$25.

If you would like to meet up and chat informally about Ensembl at ASHG, Emily will be happy to speak to you. Do you have any specific questions about Ensembl, or would like to solve some your Ensembl problems by speaking to us? We can walk through the Ensembl website to see if we can solve your problems. Please bring along any data or information we’d need. Perhaps you’re also interested in hosting an Ensembl workshop at your institute and would like to find out more about it? We can discuss what a workshop would entail, how to organise it and maybe pencil in some dates.

You can book an appointment to meet Emily using our booking system, then we’ll arrange somewhere to meet up. Appointments are free, but please state briefly what you would like to chat about when you book. There may also be a limited number of slots to speak to Paul. There will be lots of people on the Workshop, so don’t assume that you’ll be able to ask your questions then; it may just be too busy. Even if you’re going to the Workshop, you might still want to book an appointment to talk about your specific issue.