If you are working on large sets of genomic data or carrying out detailed and complex bioinformatic analyses, keep on reading.
Do any of the following thoughts ring a bell for you?
- I’d love to fetch protein coding genes from my species of interest.
- It’d be great to be able to get orthologous of the genes I’m working on.
- I want to find out if my sequence variants fall in regulatory regions and I want to know it now!
If so, the Ensembl Perl APIs are the the way to go!
We can teach API workshops at your institution
We offer Perl API workshops on a regular basis. Our last off-site course was at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. We had a whopping 26 attendees. Four members of our Ensembl team, namely Magali Ruffier, Laurent Gil, Thomas Juettemann, and Stephen Fitzgerald delivered the modules on the Core, Variation, Regulation and Comparative Genomic aspects of the Ensembl database. Have a look at some of the feedback we had:
- ‘Skills from the workshops have opened up my options for accessing Ensembl data which will allow me to more efficiently cross compare information’
- ‘I will be retrieving specific data more efficiently now’
- ‘It is quite easy to retrieve the whole set of exons from the genome with several lines of Perl script’
- ‘The regulatory features can be easily fetched by chromosomal location and that helps me looking at over-expressed regions in my RNA-Seq experiments’
Thomas Juettemann from the Ensembl Regulation team and his happy crowd!
How can you host an API workshop at your institution? Just get in touch. We request that travel, accommodation and subsistence costs of the instructor(s) are reimbursed by our hosts.
API workshop in Cambridge, UK
If you are in or around the UK at the end of this year, you may want to sign up for our next API course at the University of Cambridge. It’ll take place on December 2nd-5th and places are still available. For more information and registration please have a look at the course description.
If these dates are no good, don’t despair. We have got a couple of API courses already lined up for 2015. Check our calendar to see where we are going next.
More information on our APIs
The Ensembl project provides a comprehensive set of APIs (Application Programme Interfaces) that allows our users to access genome wide information rather efficiently and quickly. Our APIs are of two types: Perl and REST.
Find more about the Ensembl Perl APIs on our help and documentation page and watch our filmed course. For tips on how to install the API via GIT and FTP, have a look at our youtube video.