Bioinformatics Research Guide: Ensembl Project

The Ensembl project was started in 1999, some years before the draft human genome was completed. Even at that early stage it was clear that manual annotation of 3 billion base pairs of sequence would not be able to offer researchers timely access to the latest data. The goal of Ensembl was therefore to automatically annotate the genome, integrate this annotation with other available biological data and make all this publicly available via the web. Since the website's launch in July 2000, many more genomes have been added to Ensembl and the range of available data has also expanded to include comparative genomics, variation and regulatory data.

Link: http://uswest.ensembl.org/index.html

Operating Institution:

Currently, the Ensembl group consists of between 40 and 50 people, divided in a number of teams.

• The Genebuild team creates the gene sets for the various species. The result of their work is stored in the core databases, which are taken care of by the Software team. This team also develops and maintains the BioMart data mining tool.
• The Compara, Variation and Regulation teams are responsible for the comparative, variation and regulatory data, respectively.
• The Web team makes sure that all data are presented on the website in a clear and user-friendly way.
• The Production team are responsible for coordinating the regular updates to Ensembl data.
• Finally the Outreach team answers questions from users and gives workshops worldwide about the use of Ensembl.

Supporting Institution(s):  European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBI-EBI), which is located on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, south of the city of Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Tutorial: http://uswest.ensembl.org/info/index.html