We are very excited to announce the release of Ensembl 100, along with Ensembl Genomes 47! Time has really flown for us. We moved from our beginnings as a browser with just one genome 20 years ago to an integrated resource for many species and data types in 2020. In this release we continue to scale up, bringing you 29 new genomes and a lot more.

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If you are filtering a set of variants to look for those potentially involved in disease, your first stop will probably be databases of phenotype associations, like ClinVar. There is also a lot of valuable information on variant-disease associations in the literature, which may not yet have been extracted into curated databases. It can be hard to compile lists of citations for a large set of variants, but Ensembl VEP is here to help! 

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Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a programme that has been set up by Google to introduce students to open source software development. It links students to open source organisations such as Ensembl. The students work remotely with their GSoC project mentors during the university summer break and get paid for it by Google. Both students and organisations go through a rigorous application and selection process. It ensures that the students are among the very best and that the organisations are committed to mentoring them and their projects effectively. We think that GSoC is a great programme for students as well as Ensembl as an open source organisation and are glad that we had the opportunity to be part of it again this year!

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We will make changes to the directory layouts of both the Ensembl Genomes FTP server (ftp://ftp.ensemblgenomes.org/pub/) and the Ensembl GRCh37 FTP server (ftp://ftp.ensemblorg.ebi.ac.uk/pub/grch37/) that may affect your pipelines. These changes will come into effect in Ensembl Genomes release 43/Ensembl release 96, which are scheduled for April 2019. Here are the details, so that you can plan any required updates to existing scripts and pipelines ahead of the releases.
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