Annotation of the recent human assembly, GRCh38, was released in e76 in August 2014. Since then we have been maintaining a dedicated site to the GRCh37 assembly. The reason for updating annotations on the previous human assembly is to support those users who may still have data annotated on the old assembly, and who can not yet run their analyses on the new assembly. The Genome Reference Consortium (GRC) keeps a blog on the assemblies that they maintain which may be a good source of information if you are still contemplating a move to GRCh38. If you are wondering about the migration from GRCh37 to GRCh38 within Ensembl, we published a blog series which may be of interest.

We are now pleased to announce that the GRCh37 archive site has been updated with new human data sets. In addition to data imports, we have also utilised the improved regulatory build pipeline for mapping all available human regulatory features to the GRCh37 assembly. We have also re-built the GRCh37 Ensembl, Regulation and Variation BioMarts to integrate the updated data sets.

Highlights from some of the data imports for this release are:

• Genotypes from 1000 Genomes Phase 3
• dbSNP142 human data
• Latest release of public HGMD data (version 2014.4)
• COSMIC version 71
• RefSeq GFF3 annotation

A complete list of the changes can be found on the Ensembl GRCh37 website.